Love's Blush

by Sabrina Zbasnik

  It began to grow larger, trying to scare Lana back. She was but one woman about to fight a pride demon, the most terrifying of the pantheon. And yet... A soft chuckle broke from her. The demon paused, its height leveling as it asked in an almost panicked voice, "What's so funny?"

  "I am Solona Amell, and you..." She whipped the blade around, slicing deep into the creature's belly. Before it had a chance to whip its claws against her flesh, she shoved a hand deep into the innards and then lit it all on fire. The ball of fire danced, burning the demon alive from the inside. Staggering away, she could see it growing in strength, this red white ball trembling with fury as the demon's blood fed its hunger. The pride demon tried to rip it out, to save itself, but it was too late.

  Tossing the sword to the ground, Lana grabbed both her hands in the air, feeling the ball of fire inside of it and then ripped them apart. Erupting from the inside out, the pride demon exploded. Intestines and other organs rained down upon the frozen combatants who fought to save Denerim, no one reacting to the death of a demon.

  "...should not have challenged a woman who breathes the fade," she finished, kicking a foot into the pride demon's liver. For two years, she'd killed these things and used their organs to hold her water, to scorch spiders, to keep her alive. Without the demon to hold court over this part of the Fade, the illusion shattered. Brick by brick, the tower of Drakon fell apart but Lana didn't feel the pull to the earth.

  Walking as if on thin air, she stepped towards a single blue light flickering in the distance. A soft noise broke from it, the sound as weak as an unweaned puppy, but she kept her guard up. In the fade she didn't need her cane, didn't feel a jarring pain up her legs that grew so familiar it was unnerving to not have it. She was the young hero, the Warden the pride demon attempted to feast upon, who prepared herself for another round.

  The noise switched to a sniffling, as if someone couldn't stop crying and rather than attempt to stymie it, was merely breathing through the mucus and tears. Blue light flickered against a single basin, barely casting any illumination save a lone beam upon a man's face. He sat perched upon a bench, his head in his hands as he dug into his hair and cried.

  "Kieran?" she spoke, her voice shattering the empty void.

  His head snapped up, a sleeve trying to stifle the tears as he raised the other hand with magic to ward off demons, "Who goes there?"

  "It's me, I'm..." she stuttered, realizing he'd never met her and had no reason to trust her, "I'm a friend of your mother's."

  "My mother has friends? Next you shall tell me chocolate rains from the sky," he snorted and Lana laughed in response. Together, they both shook off the spells warping in their fingers. He looked normal, human -- as normal as one could look in the Fade, but...there was something wrong. When her eyes darted to the edges of his body it felt unfinished. Not as if she could see missing skin or bones, but as if all of Kieran wasn't here.

  "You should not have come," he said softly. "It is too dangerous."

  "The pride demon?" she asked, sliding onto the bench beside him. The blue light lifted higher, churning slightly amber. Was that Kieran's doing or the Fade reacting to her? "I killed it, Kieran. You're safe. Free."

  He snickered, his lip lifting in a hauntingly familiar fashion, "The demon wasn't here for me. It had no use for someone like me. But my mother..."

  "What do you mean?" Lana shook her head. She'd been certain that it must have been the pride demon's machinations. It taunted her to keep her busy and away from freeing its prey. Now that it was dead, surely they could both leave together.

  "Even if it did want me, it couldn't touch me. Not in here, not where I'm..." he twisted his face into a pucker and spat out, "safe."

  "I don't understand," Lana shifted on her haunches, trying to get Kieran to look at her, but the boy was busy staring at his hands. Could he see the same missing edges?

  "Forgive her, she knows not what she does," the boy whispered. It sounded like something he'd read or heard often, struggling to take it to heart. But it made no sense here.

  "Kieran, please, I'm here to help you. To save you," she began to reach towards him to try and hold his hand but the boy yanked it away quickly and wary eyes glared at her.

  "You can't," he sighed, his hands coming to rest upon the bench. He turned away to gaze against this blue prison but Lana didn't move from him.

  "Why? Why can't I help you? What's keeping you from waking?"

  The boy snickered, "Ask my mother."

  "Morrigan? But she's as lost as any of us. She's so beside herself she was willing to..." Lana let the thought die, but Kieran grew intrigued by it.

  His brown eyes searched for hers through the shadows, "Willing to what? What has mother done now? Threatened an empire? Toppled a religion?"

  "Stolen a baby," Lana said.

  Kieran's brows met in confusion, then he groaned, his head flopping down. "Of course, of course she thinks that blood will, but... A baby? Whose baby?"

  Two paths here, Lana, both fraught with danger. The truth could set him off, but if he sensed the lie in here, she may lose this tenuous bond. "King Alistair's," she said, then dropped her head, "your father's."

  He didn't gasp but there was a moment of screwing up his eyes and mashing apart his forehead with his fingers. "Mother never...she never wanted to talk about him. About what happened. But no wonder he'd want nothing to do with me, being King and all."

  "That isn't what happened. It was your mother's..." Lana stopped dead in her tracks from trying to defend Alistair to the son who never knew him. "Morrigan had her reasons."

  "You know him, don't you? Just as you know me. Mother mentioned you often, the Hero of Ferelden. She'd never call you that, but thought the title funny."

  "I do know your father, I know him to be a good man. A good man who right now is terrified of his baby girl dying. If...if I can't bring you out of the fade then your mother will..."

  Kieran groaned at that and staggered up to his feet. As he paced, the light followed him, illuminating familiar stones and walls. "She will kill the child, use her blood. Maker's breath, mother. You're not thinking!"

  "Not thinking about what? Kieran, what's going on? I have to know, for the baby's life. For mine as well."

  Whether he heard her plea or not she couldn't be certain. The boy was restless and angry -- pacing back and forth, the emotion illuminated more of the deep roads where his real body lay. Where hers did as well. "She's so paranoid, panicking to try and keep me safe. And yet so certain in being right all the time. Is it any wonder the pride demon was drawn here to her? After what she did and all without checking."

  "Checking? Checking what?"

  "The blood," he froze in his steps and stared at Lana. "She never thought for a moment that I might have the old blood in me. Didn't plan for it. Didn't stop to think that it..." Kieran flexed his fingers, watching the same flutter at the edge of the eyes as if he both did and did not exist.

  "You have what you need, or what I can give you at least," he finished with, flopping back down on the altar where in the real life his body lay. As he placed his head against his hands, the light dimmed back to that single blue flame. "Tell my mother that...that I forgive her, and that she can't fight everything."

  Lana pinched into her eyes, trying to fight back a rising well of tears. The boy sounded as if he intended to let himself vanish across the void, but as long as his body remained breathing it wasn't possible. He was trapped here, in his own bubble of the fade. Impervious to demon attacks, but also impossible for him to leave it. Maker's sake, what did Morrigan do?

  "Before," Kieran gripped onto her hand and it felt solid, real, his deep brown eyes begging for something, "before you go, could you stay a bit and tell me...tell me about my father? Things mother never would."

  Nodding, Lana had to pause to suck in a breath and steady her voice. "I will. Where do I, I'm not certain where to begin."

  "What's he like?"

  "Alistair's a kind man, loyal to hi
s friends and a cause, and prone to telling the most Maker awful jokes to cut the tension or just kill a bit of time."

  The boy smiled, perhaps he'd do the same on occasion. "It's impossible to think of my mother ever being capable of standing someone like that."

  "She, they didn't get along. Really. At all," Lana swallowed, well aware she was wading into dangerous territory alone.

  Kieran blinked slowly, taking in her words and struggling to understand. If his parents never once liked each other then how did he come to be? She was prepared to tell him the truth, but he switched tactics. "Did my father ever speak of me? Think about me?"

  "He did, sometimes. Wondered what he'd say to you if he ever met you. What he'd do," Lana smiled, easily remembering a letter on the subject. "Alistair feared in trying to seem rakish and impressive on the first meeting he'd probably jam his foot into a bucket and then fall flat on his face."

  The boy laughed at the idea, then flitted his fingers through the front of his hair, yanking it upwards the same way his father would. Lana was about to point that out, when Kieran asked, "Do I have any siblings? Half ones at least?"

  "Only one, the baby that your mother..." She couldn't finish the thought, didn't want to. "Her name's Myra and her mother's an elf."

  "It must run in the blood," Kieran sighed flexing his fingers. "Tell me more of my father. His favorite food, subjects, what did he do during the blight?"

  "Well, no wise man should ever come between the King and cheese," Lana laughed, sliding back onto the bench to get comfortable. Beside her, the boy listened in rapt attention as she told him everything she could about the father he was likely to never meet.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

  Old Blood

  Please...

  She looked almost the same as she would while napping at home, her hair flattened against the pillow while barely a slip of sun made it through the shutters Cullen installed. How many times would he sneak up to their room to find her curled up in their bed catching up on sleep? He needed to know she was with him, to touch her warm cheek and brush back her wily hair. Every time he'd replace the water glass by the bed if only to explain his intrusion.

  Lana's eyelids fluttered with sleep, but this wasn't a nap. Every so often she'd flinch or sneer, then a hand would knot together into a fist. The first time it happened, he sat up higher, all but prepared to drag Lana out of the Fade, even if he had to knock the witch out to do it.

  When her hand relaxed, he snatched up her fingers. They were cold next to his skin, and gave no response back. Every other time he'd hold his wife's hand she'd give a small squeeze in return; now they lay bereft and motionless in his as she traipsed back into the world she nearly never left. He should have stopped her from doing this.

  Right, because it's easy to contain Lana when she has half a mind about anything.

  Still...she was a mother now. It wouldn't just be Cullen hurt if she didn't, if they...

  "Blessed Andraste, bride of the Maker, cast your eye upon this one traveling through the Fade. Protect and guide her from any treacherous fiends that may cross her path and most of all, please," he sat up from his prayer, Lana's hand providing the other half of the clasped hands. Sliding back a few curls that clung to her cheek, he whispered, "bring her back to me."

  "You think a god would care one whit about the machinations of a single human in a churning sea of them?"

  It was the first time the witch spoke since Lana drifted deep into the Fade. His shoulders went rigid, Cullen straightening up to let Morrigan's poison drip harmlessly off his back.

  "If you truly believe this Maker has turned from you, why beg and wheedle for his attention? It has always confounded me. In one breath the chantry claim he has left you all, and in another you invoke his name as if calling for a neighbor to come clear out the eves."

  He clasped both his hands around Lana's, still unresponsive but her chest lifted in a slow breath. Not wanting to get into a theological debate with anyone at the moment, he focused only on his wife while whispering more prayers with silent lips. After the life he lived, the horrors he witnessed, he had to believe there was some otherworldly balance to it all. A reason and purpose beyond continual chaos and destruction. Otherwise waking every morning, facing an end without hope, would break him.

  Morrigan, however, did not want to drop the subject, "You'd be far better off calling for Farmer Theodore to come to your aid than this Andraste or the Maker. What help could either provide beyond a convenient excuse to wave away anything you fail to understand?"

  She stepped away from Kieran, either no longer needed for this connection or perhaps she never was. Maybe Lana lied to him and she could now enter the fade at will. How powerful was she growing, were all mages growing as the veil sputtered to its supposed doom? And what hope could anyone have against such magics unseen of since the days of Arlathan?

  "Templar," Morrigan hissed, clearly needing attention, "have you no answer for your faith? No explanation?"

  "It is not faith if I do," Cullen whispered to himself before turning to the witch. She looked more haggard than he remembered, the woman at Skyhold appearing that startling un-age that could be anything between 20 and 40. Now the world beat her down, the eyes sharp, but the cheeks sagging and pocked. So long they'd been on the run it was doubtful she had an easy time of it. Perhaps that should make him feel sympathetic, it probably would to Lana.

  "Belittle it, belittle me, I don't care what you spew," Cullen said, glaring at her. "All that concerns me," he turned back to his wife laid out like the princess waiting for true love's kiss to wake her. It didn't work when she was trapped in the warden prison, nor would it work now. "Is her well being and my son's. Threaten that and then we shall have true words."

  Morrigan sucked in a breath, her arms crossed as she was no doubt planning to unleash more of her vitriol if not against the chantry, then the templars themselves, or the uselessness of Cullen. They rarely crossed paths in Skyhold, the witch seeming happier for it, and he didn't care. As far as he was concerned back then she was the Inquisitor's problem. And now, they were trapped together, the woman unable to let go as she needed to poke and prod at something for a distraction.

  She looked about to unleash it, when a shadow drifted from beside Cullen's edge of sight. Morrigan glanced up at it and then sneered, turning from them both. But before she could drift away, she whispered, "I do not wish any pain to Warden Amell."

  It wasn't until her words finished ringing in his weary ears that Cullen caught on to why she left in a huff. Alistair stepped nearer, his hands hanging limply against his thighs as he stared hard at Lana, then glanced briefly towards his son. "How are things going?"

  "She has not moved in an hour," Cullen reported. Perhaps it had been longer, he couldn't tell. "My son?" he whipped over quickly at Alistair, remembering who he left to guard his only child. The Maker had a true sense of humor in such things.

  "Is sleeping. He and Myra were having a fun game of let's see what bad thing we can touch then put in our mouths to make the funny man shriek to stop. That was so invigorating, they both conked out like a light. Reiss is keeping an eye on them, but I imagine they'll be down for a bit."

  His words faded as he stood up on tiptoes to gaze at Lana, then stared around the ruins, "Being down here, it's hard on them."

  "Hard on us all," Cullen added in.

  "True, very very true," he beat his hands together, something clearly on his mind that he didn't want to say. "So, uh, is this her first time in the fade since...?"

  "Yes," Cullen spat out, glaring down at her silent fingers wrapped up in his. Wake up. Grip back. Please. Don't fall into this un-wakeable state the same as the boy. Could it be transferred? Was it contagious like an illness?

  "Hey," a hand gripped onto his shoulder, gently patting it, "she'll get out of it. She's strong."

  "Stubborn beyond measure is more the truth of it."

  Alistair laughed a moment, "That's...I was about to say you have no idea,
but I imagine I'm the one without a clue now. Not that Reiss isn't much better."

  They weren't friends, they didn't speak well of each other, they never traded advice nor even letters. Everything Cullen knew of the man came second hand from his wife. But as he clung to her limp fingers, his palm caressing her cooling forehead, he looked over at the man clearly wanting someone to talk to.

  The King was trying to yank his hair up by the roots, his head rocking back and forth like a buoy on the waves. "You wanna know the worst part about parenting? There's never enough time. Somedays I'm so tired of looking at my kids, they're whining, they're crying, they're covered in shit because one dumped the other down the latrine for a laugh. It's infuriating. But then I look up and think, 'Maker's breath, how much of all this did I just miss?'"

  "Your other two," Cullen turned back to find the man with his head tipped up to the ceiling, perhaps to disguise any tears. "You miss them?"

  "Every damn second I can't see them. And yet, when I am with them there are times I'd give anything to get away. It's... I keep thinking Spud's probably doing her sketches of all the advisors and making them guess who it is. Get it wrong and she'll sulk for a week with her bottom lip shoved far enough out you can balance an orange on it. And Cailan, he's upset because I'm not there to get the socks right. Three on the left -- green, red, green again -- one purple on the right. Got to get it just right or..."

  He slumped to the ground, the man's strings cut at thinking of the other children in his life that were far from their father. Moaning, Alistair dug his hands through his face and hair, "As if Spud didn't already hate the baby before, now she's going to despise Myra for years, perhaps forever. Just what I need to leave behind when I finally cross the veil, a Queen trying to get someone to carve out her step-sister's heart because Daddy was too busy playing with that baby and missed out on her drawings. I'm so bad at this."

  "The Inquisitor has asked me to return, twice over now," Cullen confessed.