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After Solas bound his blood to the Veil, Rook disappeared.
Neve remembered the long, long climb down the calcified yoke that tethered the palace to the ground, exhausted and battered and hollow beyond the mere complaints of flesh. Cheers and song met them at the end of everything, and Rook landed heavy, his hand lingering on the tendril as if he preferred that known horror over the joy before him. The people swarmed their small group, grasping at them, voices crying out. They wanted to lift him up, to touch a part of him, to boast that they got close enough to share air with the Veilguard. With Rook, the hero of it all. Their hero, of their blood.
They didn’t give him a title. No Hero of Ferelden, no Champion of Kirkwall, no Herald of Andraste. He was just Rook. And while Davrin and Taash fended off his countrymen, Rook stared out at the city, and Neve saw Minrathous personified in him. Moving, breathing. Empty.
They retired to the Lighthouse, and in the night, he left.
When they had all thought he mourned Varric, those long months of teeth-gritted silence and what they’d seen as stubborn denial, they’d each tried to help him in their own ways. Walks through gardens. Offerings to the Wall of Light. A brother’s memory, broken off and passed to him like bread on a feastday. Fresh grief. Old grief. Shared grief. Though he kept his mourning muted, he’d taken their outstretched hands, if unwillingly.
But then they’d pulled him from the regret prison, and he’d come out wrong. As a Tranquil might be cut from the Fade, he too, was severed from something life-giving, and he’d stared at their offered warmth as if it were a language he’d never heard.
Lucanis was the last to stop looking.
Despite his duties as First Talon, he would leave House Dellamorte under the sharp and disapproving eye of Caterina to scour old haunts, trying to track Rook down. Neve discouraged him—leave him in his grief, she said. He’ll come back when he wants to. Neither of them voiced the fear that perhaps, like a Grey Warden wreathed in serpents and Vyrantium samite, he’d heard a Calling of his own.
◈ ◈ ◈
Winter never shook easy from Minrathous. The city hoarded the sleet and hail, gathered it like a cloak around its towers, as if the fresh spring light would reveal all its shames. Neve found herself ducking through its alleyways one night, her prosthetic clinking over dark stone; magical signs smeared their reflections across her path, the constant rain tapping like long nails over her hood. The sewers were flooding again, the smell from the Waterworks permeating Docktown like a second storm.
As she approached her apartment, she extended her awareness to nullify the magical wards that dissuaded any nosy opportunists. The lock opened to her touch, and she stepped inside, grateful to be out of the weather. It was a modest space. Her unexpected promotion to leader of the Threads did little to encourage her to upgrade. It suited her in all its simple trappings. Clean. Functional. Dry.
She hung up her coat, fishing from the pockets a few missives Dorian had pressed into her hands. The Archon had ambushed her again that morning. He wanted Rook on the Publicanium, a sympathetic voice to his cause, and every time he saw her he pecked at her endlessly about Rook’s whereabouts like a seabird with a stubborn clam. And just like every time before, Neve had been brusque but polite: She had no idea where Rook was. The man deserved some peace. Let him be.
With a sigh that filled the still room, she eased into the chair at her cluttered desk, briefly skimming the missive. More of the same. Rewards that bordered on bribery. Personal appeals. All with the hope that she could somehow set it in Rook’s hand. A lost cause, she thought. Rook had had a dream once: a new Imperium, free from slavery and blood magic and cultists. She was of the opinion that dream had died with Lace.
The week after he’d vanished she’d gone to Ferelden. Lace’s mother, dressed black as the dead blight around her home, had told her she’d send word if Rook showed up. She even invited Neve in for tea, and she’d obliged, if only to chase after the shadow of Lace’s smile, the echo of her laughter. But Maren’s hospitality did not extend to joy that day. Tea and cake could not substitute warmth no matter how politely they were served, and the spaces that Lace had left in the corners of the cottage gathered like a storm. As soon as Neve’s cup was empty, she’d all but fled.
Neve rubbed her eyes. He’d come back when he was ready. Almost passively, she threw small pebbles of ideas into the deep water of her mind, watching the ripples. The Threads. The Archon. The scars Elgar’nan had left on the city, running deeper than the stone. Through the shimmer, memories surfaced—of the evenings when after a hard day Rook would shut away in his room and with harder spirits he’d drink himself into a stupor. No matter how many stones she threw within herself, no matter how many other matters she tried to turn her mind to, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d curled up somewhere out of the way like an old cat who knew its time had come.
She tapped her nails on the desk. A personal inquiry. That would be expected. She had no intention of hauling him back into Tevinter politics like the gasping and thrashing catch in a fisherman’s trawling net. With the decision made, the surface of her thoughts stilled—the stopping pin of a winch settling into a slotted gear.
Using the Crossroads, Rook could have gone to ground anywhere in Thedas, but there was one place she couldn’t shake. One little farmstead that called to her like the very well of power within herself.
◈ ◈ ◈
The humble cottage would have looked straight out of those idyllic Fereldan posters if not for the snakeskins of shed blight caging the lane like dry cypress. The grey weatherboard of the house was decorated with lurid tendrils of black staining; a certainty sank leaden in her stomach that the marks would be impossible to scrub out. Defiant against the monochrome, a well-tended square of colour and life crowded up to the side of the house, pumpkins and cabbages and crawling vines of peas the only bright thing amongst the dead land surrounding them. The Wardens and Circle mages had done their job. A neatly allotted ration of blessed land.
The stairs to the porch complained softly beneath her weight. On the door hung a dried sprig of something, but she couldn’t say what it was. Some Fereldan custom. Waxed leather rainboots slouched along the wall like a line of old uncles waiting for something to gossip about. One of the pairs was pierced through—she flinched—with stitched flowers, spider’s webs glinting in their empty throats. A larger pair leaned languorously against them. Newer than the rest, mud splatter dried grey. Voices floated from inside, muted. Two women. The babble of a child. She rapped her sceptre on the door.
“Coming, one moment!”
Maren Harding opened the door and her complexion paled. She looked better than the last time Neve had been there, her mousy hair pulled back into a tidy braid and her sturdy black clothing unstained. A little bit of life returning, piece by piece. The glooming clouds above did little to stop the afternoon light casting Neve’s cruel shadow over her.
“Good morning, Maren.”
“Madam Gallus!” Her thumb pressed into the edge of the door, the skin around her nail leeching colour.
“I’ve told you, ‘Neve’ is just fine.”
Maren hesitated in the doorway. Behind her, a blonde human woman sat at the dining table, a toddler standing in her lap, fat little legs bouncing. Neve almost blinked against the colour of it all. A tablecloth painted with garish red strawberries, jars of bright preserves lining a shelf, the walls yolk-yellow. Oblivious to the tension, the child pressed its little fingers into its mother’s face, giggling.
“Everything alright?” the woman called, grasping the toddler’s hands.
“Just fine, Maria. Won’t be a moment.” Maren stepped out onto the porch in her clogs and closed the door behind her. Wiping her hands down the front of her apron, she addressed the air somewhere above Neve’s shoulder. “What are you doing back here?”
“I know you’re not happy to see me.”
“That’s not—”
“Oh, I don’t mind. You have every reason.”
Maren deflated with a sigh. “It’s been a long few months.”
“I know.”
“Did you want tea?” she asked, gesturing to the closed door.
“Rook still hasn’t shown up,” Neve gave instead of an answer.
The dwarf set her fists on her hips, the movement so much like Lace that Neve took a sharp inhale. Her face, though, remained soft and sad.
“He’ll come around when he’s ready, I’m sure.”
“If you know anything—”
“I said I’d tell you.”
Neve clenched her jaw. Just as stubborn as her daughter. “He’s needed.”
“You and the others ought to leave that poor boy alone,” Maren said, startling in the harshness of her tone, a sudden flush flooding her cheeks. “He’s done enough. A bundle of spokes without a rim still don’t make a wheel.”
“His people miss him,” she said, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat. “And I’m sure they’d just be happy to know he’s safe.” Her hands trembled at her sides. Softer, then: “We’re all mourning.”
Maren cast her eyes to the ground. For a while they stood there in a silent stand-off. The breeze whispered through the skeletons of the trees, bringing with it the lowing of cows and chatter of birds and some far distant metronomic crack of an axe against wood. If not for the husks of blight and dead ground caging in the small patch of life, it might have been peaceful.
“Please, Maren,” Neve said, a bare whisper. She clenched her hands tight, her manicured nails digging into her palms, and with an effort of will she cracked her own sternum open like a chestnut, laying her heart bare under that hazy Fereldan sky. “I miss him. If you’ve seen Dawes anywhere, just tell me.”
A last desperate line cast out, knowing if it didn’t catch she would return in the night, trespassing on trust and land. She didn’t want things to break entirely between them. She was the only thing left of Lace.
Maren’s shoulders slumped. She brushed a strand of hair out of her face.
“Check the southern pasture.”
Neve nodded, already turning away. “Thank you.”
“If you find him, and he doesn’t want to go, promise me you’ll leave him be.”
Neve hesitated, her boot on the haphazard paving at the foot of the steps. “I…alright.”
Maren blinked away tears, turning her face away. Under her breath, she whispered, “Forgive me.”
◈ ◈ ◈
Neve was not the kind of tracker Lace had been. Her quarry was never deer nor game nor the break of boots through forest floors. Neve traced rumours and whispers, intangible things never gripped in the hand. A smothered expression, a nervous tic. But across the field where blight had cast its unwanted seed in furrows made for wealful things, someone had sown a rut.
It wandered, meandering, yet tread over and over until not a single clear footprint could be made out. She followed alongside as it led her like an injured dog stopping to sniff at every unfamiliar scent, past limbs of blight husks piled high, grim haystacks that would feed neither animal nor flame. First over one stile, then another. The pregnant sky cast the first drops of rain upon her fascinator.
At last the trail stopped in a hollow, empty of trees living or dead. The needles on the fencing pines were almost all brown, whatever green it held fast to against winter no contest for a Blight. There was little to be seen beyond bare ground, a pile of dirt, and a wide, deep hole. Neve took a steadying breath and walked up to the edge of it.
She’d seen a baby bird once, helpless and wingless, fallen from a foolish nest. She could do nothing for it. The memory had lain deep within her, forgotten, but it untethered its moorings as she stared into the deep hollow, and she remembered with a suddenness its bent and broken body.
The hole was deep, five feet or more. It had a bottom, but perhaps only because a large, flat stone barred the way against simple farmers’ tools. Not for lack of trying; scars criss-crossed its surface, divots and fresh wounds gouged by dull metal.
In that grave, Rook lay curled against the flat rock like he too had placed innocent trust in the walls of his nest. His Fereldan clothes were muddy, and rain gathered in the rust-stained divots of the granite. His feet were bare and filthy, his trousers rolled up his calves. She couldn’t see his face, obscured as it was by his hair, longer than she’d ever seen it.
For a moment, she thought him dead, and her heart lurched. Then his head shifted, and he stared up at her, blinking against the rain and the stringy fall of his unwashed hair. Though his eyes met hers, she couldn’t say if he saw her. Then he turned his head away once more and nestled his cheek against the stone.
She ground her teeth for a moment, her throat tight. The rain grew heavier, sticking his hair damp to his face. She hesitated, then dropped down, her prosthetic clanking against the rock. He didn’t stir.
“Rook,” she said quietly.
“Why’re you here,” he whispered, barely audible above the rain tapping against leather, cloth, and earth.
She crouched down. “I needed to see you.”
He pressed his face further into the stone. “What does Ashur want?” he asked, bitter.
“Nothing.” She hovered her hand over his shoulder, then pulled away. “We…I was worried.”
He was silent for a while. The rain pooled in the low spots of the grave, churning up the dirt, making little ripples.
“I can hear her sometimes,” he whispered. His hand splayed out, gentle as a lover’s caress, his fingers seeking the natural curves and rifts in the rock. “Through the ground.”
She felt her face crumple. “Come back, Rook.”
His fingers stilled, and he turned his head enough to peer up at her through the sodden curtain of his hair. Slowly, as if he held a sack of stones on his back, he pushed himself up on his hands. Rain dripped from his nose, and he stared blankly at the wall of dirt before him. She could smell a whiff of spirits. Sharp whiskey. It wafted stronger when he spoke.
“No.”
“Rook—”
Then he stood, tottering before planting his palms over the lip of the grave and hefting himself up. Neve stood swiftly and followed, mud staining the front of her pristine white coat. Rook was already striding away from her, bare feet slapping in the mud as he cut a direct line to the fence. The rain came down hard.
“Rook!” She overtook him, swung around, and began walking backwards to catch his eye. “You can’t keep hiding away from us.”
He changed direction abruptly, his head down. She hounded after him.
“Everyone is worried.”
He shook his head, sharp. Once more she tried to cut him off, and once more he turned without looking at her.
“Please,” she cried, annoyed at the desperate whine her voice made. “You can’t mourn alone like this.”
He whirled suddenly and shoved her. She stumbled back and caught herself, barely, staring at him as she rocked less with the force of the push, more the shock that he’d done it at all.
“Just—just fuck off, Neve!” His chest heaved, fists clenched, his dark hair plastered to his face. “This blighted world’s taken everything from me.” He shoved her again. Ready for it, she was braced. “Everything!”
Her mouth worked, her brows knitting, no words helpful or otherwise leaving her.
“So don’t come here,” he rasped into her silence, his voice breaking, “telling me that it needs more from me. I’ve given enough.”
With that he made to stalk away again, but she grabbed his shoulder and gripped tight against his efforts to shake her off.
“Not the world, Dawes. Just me. Maybe I need you,” she said, trying to turn him to her. “I’ve lost Lace. I don’t want to lose you too.”
He gave one last ineffectual shrug, his head angled away. Then he lifted a shaking hand to his face and let out one broken, husky sob. Neve pulled him to her, wrapping him up in her arms; when he went limp, she was ready. He gripped the back of her coat and cried into her shoulder, ragged and undone. Her embrace bound him like the unyielding hoops of a wine barrel, but her hand smoothed gentle over his sodden hair.
Through heaving breath, his voice high and reedy, he asked, “Why does everything good leave me? What have I done?”
“Nothing at all,” she said, her throat tight.
“I don’t want to go back,” he rasped, though he clung to her like he’d never let go.
“You don’t have to.” She held the back of his head, rocking slowly like a parent trying to soothe a wailing child. “Maybe it’s selfish of me to ask another thing of you. But I’ve missed you.”
She held him tight until his sobs slowed, until there was just his breath, uncontrolled and shuddering. When she pulled away, leaving her hands on his shoulders, he pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. He gritted his teeth against the hiccuping breath that shook his body.
“Let’s go in,” she said. “You’ll catch a cold like this.”
“Venhedis,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t.” She steered him back toward the farmstead. “Can’t live off ‘sorry’s, no matter how people seem to think. If it could pay the rent I might not complain about hearing it so much.”
◈ ◈ ◈
Maren fussed over a dull-eyed Rook, wrapping him in a towel and sitting him at the dining table close to the fireplace. With the rain loud on the roof and a fire blazing, on any other day it would have been cosy and welcome. Maria and the baby had disappeared further into the home, the child babbling and blowing raspberries. Neve stood against the kitchen counter, the only comfort she indulged in being to shed her drenched coat and hang up her fascinator. Rook stared down at the table.
Maren made tea, then with a soft touch to Rook’s shoulder left to pay host to Maria, leaving them alone in the kitchen. Neve twitched back the lace curtain from a window that looked out into the yard, cradling a steaming mug in one hand. The amber lights from the village below pierced through the haze of rain, smoke winding up from every chimney. Ferelden marched on in spite of the blight.
She let the curtain fall and turned back to Rook. He held his hands around the porcelain cup, staring into nothing. With a full beard and his dark wavy locks reaching past his ears, he looked like a different man entirely. Drops fell from his hair and nose, making damp spots in the tablecloth. The towel sat limp around his shoulders.
Neve tutted, setting her tea down next to him. “You should dry your hair.”
He made a non-committal grunt.
She exhaled slowly through her nose, then moved behind him. He barely reacted as she took the towel and started drying, scrunching clumps of it gently in her fists.
“I was young when I was sent to the Circle,” she said. “I didn’t really want to go. Everyone made a big fuss. Neighbours, family. Even the grocer could only talk about my magic. It was like I stopped existing. A walking box of tricks.”
She examined her work, satisfied she hadn’t made any tangles, then settled the towel back around his shoulders. She couldn’t tell if he was listening, but he wasn’t asking her to shut up. She took up her cup again, leaning against the table next to him instead of retreating back to the window.
“I think that’s why detective work called to me. People in need didn’t care what methods I used. I got them results. If they liked what they heard, good. If not, at least they still saw me as a person. Angry at being told their son was using blood magic, or distraught at learning their husband was dead. That’s what they remembered me for. Not my magic.”
“You’re a lot more than all that, Neve.”
She glanced at him, surprised to hear him speak. His tea sat untouched. His empty hands had clenched to fists on the table.
He took a breath. “You were the first friend Lace made after the ritual. You gave her what I couldn’t. Someone who actually…who could actually talk about Varric.” The tendons on his hands stood up. “She’ll never know I had no idea. We never got to grieve together.” His hand went to his forehead, hiding his eyes from her, and he whispered, “There’s so much we’ll never get to do.”
Neve squeezed his shoulder, her heart clenching. “And the world goes on. Cruel, isn’t it?”
“It shouldn’t.”
“The others would want to see you.”
He didn’t speak for a while, every now and then scrubbing his thumb across his eyes and sniffing. “I don’t feel like the person they’d remember.”
“I don’t think that matters.” She patted his forearm. “You’re still you.”
He lowered his hand, his head swaying slightly as he contemplated his tea. She could make out his reflection in the dark liquid. Worn and wrung out. “I don’t think I can go to the Lighthouse. Not yet.”
“Is Maren open to guests?”
For the first time, a hint of a smile worked at his mouth. “Does the Divine recite the Chant?”
She chuckled. “It’ll do you good to have the others around. At least for a meal.”
From the other room soft laughter and the nonsense sounds of a child too young to know the meaning of words drifted in. The rain continued to hammer the roof, and over the distant mountains came a rumble of thunder. His shoulders stiffened. Right. Bel had been helping him with that. Seemed like many old fears and habits were surfacing again.
“Do you think she knew?” Rook asked quietly, his face turned toward the fire.
“Knew what?”
It was with a bare whisper that he answered, hardly enough to be heard over the rain.
“That I loved her.”
Neve gripped the edge of the table. When Lace loved, it was obvious. Free with her words and her hugs. If you were important to her, she told you to your face. Rook, though—he loved like a shamed dog. Scared to let anyone see, leaving secret offerings and subtle clues. A new journal for her, left as if discarded on her desk. Rare spices for Lucanis, hidden away in the pantry. A wobbly chair suddenly stable overnight. His love for his friends was quiet.
But not with Lace. He loved her loud like the tide is loud, like a sunshower is loud. Impossible to ignore, impossible to see anything but the evidence of its passing. His love left a line in the sand with all its offerings laid bare for Lace.
His face would soften, his perpetual frown fading like the sun breaking through clouds. When he couldn’t touch Lace he’d made it everyone’s problem. Neve was often dragged to Docktown to hunt down Venatori, watching with a cocked eyebrow as he tore through them, violence his only outlet. But with Lace, he was all softness, the hands that dealt killing slashes as gentle as if he were holding a fragile autumn leaf when he touched her hair.
Neve knew him well enough to recognise he tried to hide it. But it was futile. He would have had better luck hiding the green in his eyes or the red of his blood.
Neve put her hand on his cheek, turning him to face her. “I know she did.”
And for just a flicker of a moment, there was a peace that settled in his eyes.