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Rook opens her eyes to an unremarkable darkness.
Faintly, she hears the sounds of tumbling pebbles, a settling of sand. Her cheek rests on stone, and gravel rolls under her fingertips. A quick check in with her body finds a few aches and scrapes, but nothing serious.
From somewhere in the dark, she hears a groan of pain.
“Emmrich?” she hisses with recognition and concern. She puts out a hand and summons her magic to her, letting a crackling orb of energy take shape. Purple light fills the space.
A body—there, not far from her. A shape she knows well. Emmrich hasn’t gotten up yet—panic tightens a hand around her throat. Rook hops up into a crouch and shuffles to his side.
He’s breathing. He’s wincing in the light.
“Are you all right?” she asks, in the same moment as he says, “Are you hurt?”
There is an awkward beat between them, until Rook offers, “I’m fine. Here, I’ll help you up.”
He takes her hand and she pulls him into a sitting position. With a twist of his fingers, his own green Veilfire shimmers into light, casting them, and their newfound space, into a two-tone glow.
“I’m unharmed, thank you,” he replies, proper. Their eyes meet each other in the dark.
Rook breaks first, and rocks back on her heels, getting to her feet to take in their predicament. It is: not good.
Somewhere above, they had been fighting across Tearstone Island, racing for the gods’ ritual site. Swaths of Venatori and Antaam and mercenaries had thrown themselves in front of them and their allies, hell-bent on stopping the approach. It hadn’t worked on the beach. But as the team climbed the layers of ancient elven ruin, one stray shot from an artillery cannon had, apparently, done the trick.
“We seem to be fully enclosed,” Emmrich observes, voice sounding detached and clinical in a way that, at this very moment, Rook finds incredibly annoying.
“Yes, thank you, I did not miss the piles of rocks,” Rook shoots back, needlessly snide.
Rook had heard the cannon shot before she’d seen it, instinct telling her that it would explode that section of wall just moments before it happened. Emmrich had been in front of that wall. He would have been killed immediately, but Rook had blinked to his side, grabbed him around the waist and spun him free of the blast.
The act had thrown them both off-balance. And because they were off-balance, when the wall fell away, and the floor beneath it as well, they had gone down with it.
A short drop, which turned into a long, tumbling slide, down the wall of a chasm. Into the dark below.
A dark they now occupied.
Somehow, they had been spared an instant death. A larger section of wall had fallen at an angle, wedged between debris and boulders, such that it made a slanted roof above them. On all sides there was an impenetrable mess of rock, but they had been left just enough space to survive.
For now.
In the present, Rook begins to check each stone that confines them, trying to figure out what—if anything—can be moved. Emmrich seems to be testing something with magic, lifting his handful of Veilfire around the space.
He swings his arms to the right as she shifts to the left, and they collide awkwardly.
“Excuse me,” she grumbles, unmoving.
He blinks at her, then pulls back from her path with an exaggerated bow.
As she continues past, he says, “I don’t know that your attitude is helping our situation.”
Rook scoffs as she presses a shoulder against a carved stone piece which may have once been a banister. “So sorry. Should I try to be more cheerful?” The stone piece doesn’t move. She pushes back from it, and claps her gauntleted hands. “Oh what an exciting adventure we are having!”
“That is not what I mean, Rook, and you know it.” Emmrich stands stiff and straight, which means his styled hair is just brushing the ceiling. He probably thinks the posture gives him an air of authority, Rook figures.
“It’s just that…” She can’t meet his eyes. “It’s so fitting. That I would be trapped like this. Today. With you.”
Emmrich lets out the faintest, “Ah,” and says nothing more for a while.
When Rook finally looks back at him, he is still staring at the little flame, morose. “What are you trying to do?” she asks.
He clears his throat. “Flame, even Veilfire, draws on elements from the air. I was hoping to find a crack, perhaps, where a draft might be coming in…”
“But…?”
He swallows hard, and shakes his head.
“And I can’t find a single stone worth shifting that wouldn’t bring the whole mess down on us if I did,” she adds.
A shudder runs down his spine. He turns to inspect the space again, and immediately bumps his head on a low-hanging rock, and then another as he withdraws. As he crouches lower, rubbing his forehead, Rook has to suppress a laugh. There is something so ridiculous about seeing a renowned intellectual conk his noggin’ twice in a row, while facing certain death, that the incongruity tickles her.
“Don’t tease me now,” he mumbles at her, with an expression he would deny being a pout.
She slides down to the floor, back against the smoothest rock she can find, and sighs. “So what do you think gets us first: lack of food? Lack of water? Lack of air?”
“Hm.” Emmrich finds his own spot, still rubbing at his head, while his long legs stretch out across the floor. “Hopefully none of those. But to help issues, we might want to… minimize our magic.” He takes the Veilfire from his fingers and passes it to the lantern-end of his staff. Once there, it dims, setting off the faintest glow.
Rook considers the purple orb floating at her side, and with a deep breath, snuffs it out as well. “Well the upside, if you can call it that, is that the team will probably try to find us soon enough.”
His voice in the dark is softer than she’d expect. “I wish that were true, Rook, but it is in their best interest to continue on to the ritual site.”
“I don’t disagree,” she replies. “But…” From her waist she pulls Solas’ Lyrium dagger, which seems to have its own pale blue glow, as though, like the moon, it is reflecting a brighter, distant source. “They’ll need this to kill Ghilan’nain.”
“Ah,” he says again. It seems to be his go-to response when he is stopping himself from saying more. He’s never said it so often as now, and Rook finds herself in the unique position of hating a single syllable.
They are back to being in the nearly pitch black, though as Rook’s eyes adjust she can make out the faintest shape of Emmrich’s profile: the furrow of his brow, the strong curve of his nose. His lips are pursed together in thought. As she watches, he presses his palms together and lifts his fingers to his mouth, and it is so quiet here that she can hear every shift of the fabric of his robe, every clink of his ornamental jewelry.
She has little choice now but to observe the slightest of his actions. As if she hasn’t committed each of these nuances to memory ages ago. As if she hasn’t been soaking up each tiny gift of his presence for weeks. Her heart aches, and once again she huffs a laugh.
He turns, in the dark, and peers at her. “Rook? What is it?”
“Just thinking about yesterday,” she says, and she tries to say it without affect, but the pain is clear. “I cannot believe you broke up with me because you were worried about dying of old age.”
Emmrich makes a “tsk” of frustration. “Once again, you are being dismissive of my point.”
“Am I? What was your point, pray tell?”
“You do not understand grief as I do, Rook. You do not know how that kind of loss changes a person.”
“Don’t I?” She bristles. “How do you know I don’t have a long trail of dead lovers behind me?”
He frowns at her, the creases at the edge of his mouth just visible in the dark. “Do you?”
“Well, no. But come on, Emmrich—do you think I would have been traipsing across Thedas with Varric if I had lasting, solid attachments keeping me in one place?”
“Which is precisely why we consider the dangers of getting—too involved.” Though measured in tone, his voice catches slightly.
Rook lets out a groan of frustration, dragging her hands down the sides of her face. “What dangers? What possible dangers, Emmrich? Do you mean darkspawn? Demons? Gods who want me dead? No! You fear the greatest danger of them all: being sad someday.”
Emmrich throws up his hands. “More sarcastic derision, of course. Spirits forbid I ever attempt a serious conversation with you.”
“How else am I supposed to respond to your condescending—” she angrily searches for the right word, “—vashedan!”
“You could try listening instead of just planning for your next quip,” he shoots back. “You brought me onto the team because you thought that my wisdom and perspective would be valuable to you. But when it comes to our relationship, you dismiss it out of hand!”
He’s angry, she sees. He’s actually heated, voice raised, shoulders up. She’s never seen him react with this kind of raw emotion to anything before. Despite her own upset, she feels a flutter in her stomach.
“You will be amazing, Rook. You are destined for great things. You have your best days ahead of you. But mine—mine are behind me. You will be in the prime of your life while I will be struggling to—to walk, to tie my own shoes. And then I will die and you will have wasted such precious time…” He trails off, somewhat deflated.
She shakes her head at him, trembling. “But what is your solution to that? Are people only to fall in love with others they share a birthday with? Should we all be ritually linking arms and drinking poison once we hit an agreed-upon age? Mutual suicide so we all have the exact same amount of life and no one ever has to spend a day alone? I’m not—” she holds up a hand, “I’m not being dismissive. I promise. But it’s… No one knows when they’re going to die.”
Rook gets to her feet, gestures to their tiny prison. “Personally, I feel like my days are numbered, and if I had to guess, I’d say you share that same very small number. This whole… task, trying to stop the gods… It’s stupid, Emmrich, it’s a very stupid thing to do. I’d love to think about my older years, about learning to knit, about, I don’t know, grandkids. But I’m not counting on that now. I just want to let myself feel the things that make me happy. And each extra day I get to keep feeling like that,” she makes a quick huff of a laugh, “What a gift.”
Emmrich pulls his knees up, rests his forearms on them, tents his fingers together. “I cannot go forward with that,” he says flatly, “A relationship based in cynicism. If you are settling for me because you see me as the best option available at this moment—”
“No. No no no—”
“As I said before, we should face these trials with a clear head.”
“That’s not—now you’re twisting my words.”
“Am I?”
“Yes! This wasn’t some fling I jumped into impulsively. I flirt impulsively, and we’re long past that. I—” Rook’s voice loses some of its momentum. “When you’re near me, I feel the weight of the world a little less. I can still feel it, where you kissed my neck, that day in the Necropolis, it still makes me dizzy. When I’m falling asleep at night, I wonder the next time I’ll get to see you. I…”
She slumps again, against the stones, sliding down into a ball with her knees tucked to her chin and her head bowed. She can feel her face burning with frustration and embarrassment; she can’t face him.
His reply comes some breaths later, his voice resonant from deep in his chest. “Rook. If I misjudged the depths of your passions, I am sorry.”
“Sure.” It’s all she can say. “But today I’m ‘Rook’, right?Just ‘Rook’.”
No response comes from Emmrich, and after a moment Rook heaves a sigh.
“I don’t know why I’m fighting so hard for this anyway,” she says at last. “You made it pretty clear you don’t trust me with important choices like this. Who am I to make the hard decisions? At. My. Age?”
She drops the last three words like they’re stones she’s tossing into a pond, and watching the ripples as they sink. Behind her, Emmrich shifts at once—she can hear the rustling of his cloak.
“That,” he says, “Is not what I meant to imply. At all. I have never once doubted that you are capable of leading this team. Every one of us is behind you.”
“Not that you have a choice,” she shoots back. “Listen, we’d all be happier if Varric was still calling the shots. But that’s not the situation we’ve found ourselves in, is it?”
He’s moved behind her, a hesitant hand on her shoulder. “I have hurt you in a way I did not intend, and which you do not deserve. I…”
She lifts her head to face him, fighting back tears, and is stunned to see his eyes shining wet as well.
“I’ve been a fool,” he says at last, voice shaking. He is on his knees beside her, and although she knows it is out of necessity, that doesn’t make him look any less like a supplicant. “I… I care for you and—”
There’s a tickling at the very edge of Rook’s perception. Although she wants nothing more than to hear what he’s about to say, she holds up a hand, cutting him off.
And there, just there.
A rumble.
For the second time that day, Rook moves on pure instinct, tackling Emmrich and throwing him flat to the ground. As the stones above them begin to shake, she covers his larger form as best she can with her body. His reaction is just a second behind hers, throwing up a ward that shields them both.
And around them, the walls come down.
===
It is a deafening cacophony. Though the ward protects them from physical harm, the noise itself is overwhelming.
Rook screws her eyes shut, tucks her face against Emmrich’s shoulder, beneath her; her hands are pinned on either side of his head as though her slim frame could somehow protect him from the landslide. His hands are threaded beneath her arms, reaching past either side of her waist, holding the bright, shimmering shield above them.
Finally, finally, it dies down. The thunder retreats, the stones settle. Rook can hear herself think again.
Her first thought is: warm. Her torso is tight to Emmrich’s, her knee between his thighs. With her face tucked into the space between his neck and shoulder like this, her nose fills with the scent of him, musky and floral. The intimacy of it makes her head spin, though the thousands of pounds of rock just above them put a definite damper on things. The space they have left is little more than a coffin.
She pulls back from him, somewhat reluctant. “We’re just not catching a break today, are w—”
The words die on her lips.
Emmrich is not okay.
His eyes are wide, staring up at the suspended rubble, pupils fully dilated. His breathing is rapid, too rapid, each shallow intake followed by a gasp of exhalation. Sweat is visible on his brow and upper lip. He is, in short, panicking.
“Whoa, whoa.” Rook shifts herself, taking her weight off of him. Options are limited in their tiny remaining space, so she settles for curling into his side, one of his arms still pinned beneath her, her knee resting over his thigh. “Emmrich. We’re all right. We’re still here.”
He doesn’t respond, but shuts his eyes in a tight wince.
She hesitates for a moment, before reaching up a hand and brushing it against his cheek. “Emmrich?” She keeps her voice as even as she can manage. “Can you speak to me?”
With gritted teeth, he lifts his head a moment, drops it back again. His breathing has not slowed. “This is what they… This is what they saw before they died. This is how I lost my…”
He never finishes the thought, but realization blossoms within Rook, and she fills in the blank: This is how I lost my parents.
Her heart breaks for him, but at the same time, his ward is all that is keeping them from a similar fate. If he doesn’t calm down he’ll pass out. Rook places a hand over his heart.
“You’re not there,” she says, voice soft, “You’re here, with me.”
He barely reacts to her words, looking like a mouse cornered by a cat, trapped in his own skin.
She bites at her lip for moment, then changes tactics. “Darling. Can you hear me? Can you focus on my voice?”
Finally, his darting eyes flit to hers.
“Good. Good,” she soothes. “You’re here. I’m here. We’re both all right for now. I want you to breathe with me. Can you do that, my dear?”
It takes a second, but then he nods, the movement jerky.
“We’re going to breathe in for three seconds, then hold it, and breathe out for three seconds. All right? I will count. We’ll do it together. Ready—”
Rook inhales, deep and dramatic, and holds up fingers between them as she does. One, two, three. A pause, and then an exhale. Then she does it again.
It takes three rounds of repetition before Emmrich can match her pace, and two more before she urges, “You’re doing so well, my love.” When she’s convinced he has the new pacing down, she lets her hand rest again on his chest, and feels the heartbeat against her palm. It’s fast, still, but not as out-of-control as before.
At any rate, she has treated the symptoms but not the underlying cause. They are, in fact, still trapped under a massive pile of rubble with no hope of getting themselves out of it. If Rook starts to think about it, she’ll probably start to panic herself, and she doesn’t want to go out like that.
“Can I ask you a question?” she says instead.
Emmrich takes another slow breath, then clears his throat. “Always.”
Rook lifts her hand gently to his, careful not to disrupt his spellcasting, and rubs a thumb along one of his more ostentatious rings. “You wear all this jewelry, but just on your hands and wrists. No earrings, no necklaces… No other piercings?”
He cocks an eyebrow. “Is that your question?”
“My question,” she pushes on, with no shame, “Is what they’re all for? They’re not all enchanted. But is it a ritualistic purpose? Or do you just like being fancy?”
“Am I not entitled to my indulgences?” She opens her mouth to reply before catching his faint grin; he continues: “They are tithes. Both given to me, and intended to be taken from me when I pass. Payment for the services of the Mortalitasi.”
“Services?”
“Tending to the bodies and spirits of the dead, maintaining the Necropolis… Each of these was given to me in exchange for a specific act of caretaking. Perhaps the closest analogy is from some military orders, in which senior officers will have a collection of medals.”
Rook leans a little closer to him, shifting her weight, letting him free his trapped arm beneath her waist—but he tucks it instead under her head. His voice is still quieter, rougher than usual, but as she expected, the closer she can get him to giving a lecture, the more stable he seems to be.
She taps a bracelet. “So what was this one for?”
He hums. “At the request of a member of the van Heigl family, I used Corpse Whispering to determine the location of a relic of great personal importance.”
“And this?”
“Helped dispatch a demon which had taken possession of the body of a minor lord of Nevarra City. Discreetly, mind you.”
She pats his largest bangle, gold and curved, covering most of his right forearm. “This one?”
“That I am afraid I cannot reveal.”
This time she’s not sure if she’s joking, so she lifts her head to meet his eyes. In return, he gives a smile and a shrug.
“Okay then, keep your secrets.” She brushes her fingers along the back of his hand again, coming at last to the smallest, simplest ring. “What terrifying ritual did you have to complete for this one?”
“I reunited the skull of a husband with his recently departed wife,” he says, voice warm. “The poor man had been making quite a racket in the Necropolis, but he calmed right away when I brought them back together. It was an oversight that they had been kept separate at all. I… think of him often.”
Rook feels a tug at the corner of her mouth. “That’s… romantic.”
“The family was not of any great station, but they gathered together what they could as thanks.” Emmrich trails off for a moment, apparently lost in thought. Then he rolls slightly, lifting a shoulder to pull Rook in closer, and places a tender kiss upon her forehead. “My dear, you are a wonder. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For the distraction.”
She pulls in closer to him, a small smile upon her lips, warmth rising in her cheeks, and she lets her arm drape across his chest. It’s… nice. Rook could spend her days like this, just holding his body, being held by him. But the thought tastes bitter: the circumstances that have brought them here chase the joy from the moment.
She allows herself another deep inhale of him, ignoring the quick bite of guilt, before she speaks again.
“Love, I… I should tell you. I do think… about us. About our difference in age. I do worry about it sometimes.”
He is quiet, but she can tell she has his full attention.
“Not in the same way you do, though. I don’t think about the end. I think about… how it might appear now. When I meet with the leaders of these factions, with you at my side, sometimes I think, who are they going to want to follow? The decorated academic, with a long list of publications and accolades—not to mention so very many fancy rings—to his name? Or some idiot who stole a god’s knife?”
He huffs a quick laugh, causing her head to bounce on his chest. “Dearest, you are so much more than that.”
“Well, you know that,” Rook says. “Or you think that, anyway. But I wonder if it’s clear to anyone else.”
“The team knows.” He tilts his head to rest against hers. “I am a terrible leader, my dear. Despite how you may have reacted to me, we academics are not often known for our charisma. I am a very precisely honed instrument, able to offer a great depth of information on one very specific area of study. I, quite honestly, lack your ability to see the broader picture.”
“Emmrich…” she draws each syllable of his name out like a song. “I’m not trying to start another fight. But your diminished view of yourself does not actually help the situation.”
A beat. “Noted,” he says.
“Not to mention, I wonder about how you will be seen. Are your colleagues going to think you’ve taken leave of your senses if you show up to a discussion of your next paper and I’m on your arm?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” he mutters, with a tone that says that is now, in fact, thinking about it, and not disliking what he is picturing.
Rook rolls her chin onto his chest, pinning him with her eyes. “Be serious.”
Looking at her with fondness, Emmrich sighs. “It would likely cause some discussion, yes.”
As she settles back down against his shoulder, she lets her fingers wander over his chest, fiddling with his buttons, each gesture a mixture of nerves and affection. “With all of that said… None of that has put me off of—off of this, off of us. I know what I want. I’m not so naïve as to think there won’t be complications. But I’d rather face them head-on.” The confidence in her voice wavers. “A-and do… do you…”
“Dearest…” It’s a good start, a strong start to the kind of delicate, grand, romantic statement she is used to hearing from him. But after a moment he can’t seem to find the words, and his voice, tinged with need, just says, “Kiss me.”
He doesn’t have to ask twice.
Rook pulls herself up, brings a hand to his cheek and leans in, catching his mouth with her own. They melt against each other; she can feel his pounding heartbeat chasing her own. When they break for a breath, Rook barely gives him a chance, slipping her tongue between his parted lips and delighting in the gentle moan he gives in return.
It’s different from their previous kisses. Less formal, less polite. They have no flowers this time, just dirt, and certain death pressing down. If there’s any grace to be found in this moment, it’s that there’s little room for overthinking.
Rook runs her thumb along Emmrich’s jaw, and when he leans into the motion she dips down, pressing her lips against the planes of his neck. She traces up towards his ear, alternating kisses and nips of teeth, until with a laugh he turns back to her and slants his mouth to hers once more.
They slow, eventually, only because Rook’s head is spinning. She pants against his mouth as he rubs the tip of his nose on hers. Somehow, the soft, glittering light of the magical ward is still in place above them.
“If my hands were only free I would hold you as you deserve to be held,” he murmurs.
The low tone of his voice makes her shiver. “You have extraordinary concentration. Once we’re out of here and off this cursed island, I look forward to testing it.”
He reaction is a perfect mix of ‘stunned’ and ‘intrigued’. “My love, I promise you, I will—”
The rocks are shifting again.
As the familiar distant thunder begins again, Emmrich’s expression shifts to serious in an instant, giving strength to the shield above them. Rook goes to cover him with her body again—she’s practically already there.
But this time—
—after a minute—
—there is light.
A different sound comes, then. Some kind of creature? Rook twists off Emmrich, slotting in at his side; her arm extends over him protectively without her thinking of it. The other hand takes up her blade.
“Emmrich…”
“I’m ready, love.”
A snuffling, a shifting of stones. Gradually, the pinprick of light extends to a few scattered finger-width beams, then a hole the size of a fist.
And through that gap, a frightening, too-wide eye peers in on them.
Rook startles. But there’s something about the eye that is familiar. And after a moment she recognizes—
“Assan?”
===
From then it does not take long. Their allies are drawn to the sound of Assan’s happy calls, and soon there are extra hands pulling rock and stone free, shouting reassurances, handing through Elfroot potions. Clearing enough debris is the work of minutes, and then, at last, Emmrich and Rook are able to breathe clearly and see the sky again.
They are both filthy. Bellara fusses over Emmrich, batting dust from his robes while he does what he can to un-crick his neck. Slumped on a stone, waterskin in her hand, Rook can’t help but watch, her eyes only half-focused on the necromancer’s back.
Her gaze is so intense that she startles when Davrin slaps a hand on her shoulder.
“We thought you two were done for when that floor caved. Assan was very insistent that we look for you, though. Took us the better part of an hour just to climb down that ridge.”
A soft smile crosses Rook’s lips, as the griffon ambles over, drawn to the sound of his name, she gives him scritches in the spot behind the ears she knows he likes. “He knows what side his truffles are buttered on, don’t you, boy?” Serious then, she turns back to Davrin. “And the others…?”
“We keep hearing explosions in the distance, across the island, so it sounds like they’re managing to draw out their diversion.” He shakes his head, solemn. “But who knows for how much longer.”
“We’ve lost a lot of time already.” A part of her is agreeing with him. But she is also looking at Emmrich, again.
There is a silence, punctuated by Assan butting his head against Rook’s hand, seeking more scritches.
Davrin seems uncomfortable. “Are you two…okay? I know I’ve teased you in the past, but…”
Rook lets her fingers run through Assan’s feathers; she breathes in air tinged with dust, soot and the distant sharp decay of Blight; she hears chanting, screaming on the breeze; she feels the odd light of the eclipsed sun on her face. But when she looks at Emmrich she feels something unassailable in her chest. It is warm, and it is good, and it will not be snuffed out.
“Yes,” she tells Davrin. “I think we’re good.”
She walks to Emmrich, then, and he turns to see her approach. His eyes brighten, crinkling at the corners. There is dirt all over his collar and his hair is a little askew, but she can fix that later.
For now, she takes his hand in hers, and gives him a nod. It is both a statement and a question.
And after a moment, he nods back.
“Okay,” Rook says. “Let’s go kill a god.”