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Rain slicked the cobblestones beneath Dorian’s feet, each step echoing in the narrow alleys where shadows pooled against rotting doorways like mold. No magical lamps illuminated this quarter, and only the faint glow from the glittering night sky and candles leaked through cracked shutters. The Soporati who lived here couldn’t afford luxuries like light, let alone a clean place to live, and the lower district of Minrathous stretched before him in a labyrinth he’d learned to navigate by scent alone: sewage and sour ale. Desperation made manifest. A far cry from the perfumed air of the upper city where he was headed. His nose wrinkled. Years with the Inquisition had changed many things, but some aristocratic proclivities remained.
He adjusted his collar against the chill. The rings on his fingers, the fine fabric of his robes—blacks and deep greens with gold threading—marked him as an outsider here. The weight of his staff against his back offered reassurance, though he doubted he’d need it. Most Soporati knew better than to accost a magister, even in these forgotten corners.
Above, between breaks in clouds, stars pierced the darkness. The same stars had watched Skyhold as they fought odds that should have broken mortals.
Perhaps, if they still looked down on him now, they would see whether that light had survived the fall.
“A copper for your thoughts, Magister?”
Dorian turned. A woman leaned against a doorframe, arms crossed over her tattered dress. Her eyes held no fear, only a weary recognition that veiled over disdain.
“I'd say they’re worth at least a silver,” Dorian replied, his mouth curving into a smile, “but tonight I’m feeling generous.”
“Generous? That’s a new one. Your kind rarely make it down here, ’less you're looking for something you can’t find in your pretty villas. Give me a silver and I can be generous too.”
Dorian’s smile didn't falter, but a muscle in his jaw tightened. The implication was clear enough. Minrathous’s worst-kept secret: what wealthy Alti came here to buy. Rain caught his collar, but the shiver came from elsewhere. The depths of Minrathous held far more chilling things than the weather.
“Ah, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you then. My interests lie elsewhere.”
For more reasons than one, though only one would start a scandal.
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged, the movement pulling at the threadbare edges of her sleeves. “Offer stands, if you change your mind.”
An ache bloomed as she turned away and waved him off, shoulders slumping. He recognized the posture and shape of apathy; how many times had he seen it mirrored in his own reflection? He’d done the same—straighter shoulders, finer clothes, prettier cage—but the same.
He took a step forward, leather soles scuffing against pitted cobblestones. The urge to call out, to say something that might chip away at the defeat carved into the lines of her back, rose like bile. Pretty words from a pretty man in silk would do nothing right now. So instead…
Rain clung to the cuff of his sleeve, heavy now, dragging against his wrist. Dorian opened his palm against the weight of it, fingers stiff from the chill, then reached into his pocket, fingers brushing a half-dozen coins and Imperial tesserae. He pulled out three and held them in his rain-slicked palm.
“Wait.”
“Change your mind, sweetheart?”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” he said, tilting his head imperiously. Not even blood magic could or would change what was within him. This was part of him, just as he enjoyed doing one good thing in a place where all else was wrong because he could and because hope was its own rebellion, even if it would only benefit one woman for one evening.
“My interests do lie elsewhere, though I do hope you will be generous with me all the same. Have any of my peers from the Magisterium paid you a visit recently?”
She gave him names. He left three coins, then continued on his way.
Three coins. Pathetic, really. While magisters spent fortunes on imported Orlesian wine, she’d sleep with a full belly for maybe three nights. The mathematics of Tevinter charity: always too little, always too late. It was a futile gesture in the grand scheme of things, but he hadn’t come back to the Imperium to save one woman, one street, or even one night. No, he was here, away from friends and the freedom he’d found in the Inquisition, to claw the foundations of a system that thrived on despair until the disease bled out and then rebuild by hand if that’s what it took.
Most within the Magisterium sneered at his reforms—tonight’s motion to restrict blood magic in the slave markets would face the same reception from the same bloated parasites within the Altus class—and half the city still rotted from the inside out. But he hadn’t returned for the sake of ease; he’d returned to drag them kicking and screaming into something resembling decency.
And he hadn’t returned to be clean. No, that was why he was down here in the filth of the lower quarters at all. Coin flowed through the slums, but information moved faster; magisters came here to take what they wanted, but they also talked freely… and why wouldn’t they? To them, Soporati were an invisible caste of untouchables until they themselves wished to be touched. Then suddenly every secret spilled like cheap wine and idiots who’d spent decades scheming forgot that ears worked the same in every district, or merely assumed no one listening had the power to use what they’d heard..
If Dorian Pavus had learned one thing from the Herald of Andraste, the Inquisitor, it was that power came from the most unlikely of places.
It was even within himself, should he choose to make it so.
The list of names in his head was growing each night. Speaking to elves or slaves, the Soporati, being here amongst the lower unworthy castes, was enough to bruise a magister’s reputation by association.
Dorian straightened and pulled his collar higher, wet fabric dragging across the side of his neck. The rain hadn’t stopped. His absence was already noted and the meeting would not wait. He ran the list of names and scandals through again as he walked. Every name had a vote and some had leverage.
One had bodies in the tunnels, if rumor held.
The streets widened as he climbed switchbacking streets and corridors, cobblestones giving way to smooth marble as his boots splashed through puddles. Lamps flickered to life along the avenue, their artificial flames steady behind crystal housings. Windows here glowed with warm magelight and the air carried lavender instead of decay, masking the stench that rose from the city below. Each block erased another layer of Minrathous’s truth, painting over rot with gold leaf and good intentions.
Some might call it progress. Dorian preferred to call it what it was: cosmetics on a corpse.
And it would stay that way unless the skeleton of Minrathous could be reborn again in a new light.
Dorian glanced upward. Tevinter’s artificial glow nearly swallowed every star, leaving only the harsh geometry of power ahead. The Archon’s Palace, seat of the Magisterium, rose ahead to cast sharp-edged shadows that stretched across the plaza despite the magical searchlights that swept the streets below, threatening to devour his own.
Let them try.
Two guards flanked the doorway and they stepped aside for him without acknowledgment. The palace doors swung open with little fanfare—he was expected, not welcomed.
His footsteps echoed against the polished floor as he walked the corridors past portraits of dead Archons until, finally, he arrived. The doors to the chamber of the Imperial Senate stood open, revealing the curved stone bench amphitheater within. Magisters filled the higher tiers, their dark robes pooling around them like spilled ink.
Dorian descended the steps toward the pulpit at the center, black marble shot through with veins of gold. Their stares pressed against his shoulders, but he kept his chin lifted. He’d faced demons and dragons. Bigoted old men in expensive robes hardly compared.
“Magister Pavus.” One of the high-ranking Alti caught sight of him and sneered. “We’d begun to worry that something mightay have happened to you to explain your tardiness or that you had at last decided to stop coming solely to make a mockery of these sessions.”
“And deprive you of the pleasure of my company, Magister Varas?” Dorian’s hand found the pulpit’s edge. “Perish the thought! I wouldn’t dream of it.”
There was a susurrus of scattered laughter.
“… Very well. The floor recognizes Magister Pavus and his proposal.” Varas’s mouth twisted around the words. “Restrictions on blood magic within the slave markets. You may present your… vision.”
Vision. As if basic decency required mystical insight.
Varas’s current sneer suggested noble suffering at having to endure such tedium.
“Esteemed colleagues.” How generous of me to maintain the fiction. Dorian’s palm pressed flat against the marble. “I stand before you not to beg, but to illuminate minds that have grown quite comfortable in their stagnation. Our markets run red with more than coin. The slave markets are rampant with abuses that would sicken even hardened soldiers. Of children vanished into cellars that—”
“Rumors!” Magister Lucanus leaned forward, his scarred face twisting. “Street gossip!”
Of course Lucanus would object. The man who’d made his fortune selling “experimental subjects” to ambitious blood mages.
“Then there is no issue in our investigating these rumors.” Dorian didn’t turn toward the voice—why dignify panic with acknowledgment? His eyes swept the assembly instead, cataloging which magisters suddenly found their sleeves fascinating. “Unless transparency threatens your business model, Lucanus?”
The chamber stirred again, whispers rising like the tide.
“The South names us monsters,” Dorian continued. “We’ve earned the title through centuries of willful blindness, becoming the monsters southern mothers use to frighten children, and we wear it like a badge of honor! Empires that feast on their own foundations inevitably fall. I am asking you to consider—to try—to be better than the worst that Thedas thinks us to be and the best that I know we are capable of.”
“Pretty words from Skyhold’s pet.” The interruption came from the upper tiers. “Did the Inquisitor teach you to beg so sweetly?”
Ah, there it is. Dorian’s answering smile was sharp. He was decent enough to bite back his reply: No, but your brother taught me several other useful skills. Shall I demonstrate?
“If you miss your southern swine, then perhaps you should return to them.” Lucanus again. “You’ve forgotten where your loyalties should lie.”
“My loyalty lies with Tevinter’s future. What a shame yours remains buried with your ancestors. Tell me, when did cowardice become a family tradition for your house?” He straightened, shoulders back. “This proposal asks only for oversight. For limits on what can be done to those who cannot defend themselves. If that threatens you, perhaps you should examine why. Just as I might ask why it is you’ve been spending such a large amount of your time in the tunnels beneath the Alienage, Magister Lucanus?”
The chamber erupted as magisters who’d sat silent through decades of atrocity suddenly found their voices when asked to examine their own ledgers. Fascinating how quickly wounded pride masqueraded as righteous indignation. Lucanus was red in the face. Varas was tight-lipped and shaking his head. A few magisters were even considering, perhaps, what Dorian had said in the first place.
Through it all, Dorian stood at the chamber’s heart at the pulpit still, letting their rage break against him like waves against the coast, sliding toward, over, and then away without purchase. He’d weathered the Breach, the Fade, one that sought to claim the throne of the Maker Himself.
These men, for all their borrowed power and hoarded secrets, were merely shadows pretending at substance and had spent so long wallowing in their own bilge they’d forgotten what sunlight looked like.
No matter. He’d drag them into it anyway. Again and again. As many times as needed.
Glancing upward again at the gilded ceiling, Dorian let himself breathe a moment. Lyrium sconces glowed beneath frescoes that wheeled in fantastical constellations of fake stars painted by hands that feared the real sky. Ironic that such a well-lit room was smothered in darkness. Dim hearts, gloomy greed, insidious intentions… this chamber may have been a room in a palace, but it was little better than a tomb, fostering the death of progress and only preserving the decomposition within.
Within the Magisterium, Minrathous’s heart was black as pitch, so far removed from sense, hope, and faith that the sun, the constellations, not a single star could penetrate the walls and centuries of ghastly tradition.
So he would carry it—starlight, hope, faith, Skyhold’s vocabulary here in Tevinter’s sepulcher—to them himself, from the sky, from the slums. In his hands, between his teeth. However he must show them, even here.
Dorian shifted his hand on the pulpit. Gold thread glinted against wet skin, catching a stray flicker from the lyrium sconces overhead. He turned it deliberately, slow enough that the reflection arced across the chamber, sweeping past Lucanus’s face. The man flinched as the light slid over his eyes. He did it again, even more slowly, picking out where the light slid and where it caught. One by one, magisters noticed and their bickering hushed as he leaned forward into the glow about the podium and let it shine across the white of his teeth as his mouth sharpened to an indulgent smile.
“Gentlemen, truly, let’s not act like children. Do try to pay attention,” Dorian said, his voice cutting through the settling murmurs. “Now. Shall we discuss the particulars?”