The air thickened from her last word ringing through the small room, echoing against the window panes, and knocking about their hearts. Alistair sagged away from her thundering rage, his hands digging into his pockets as if he expected to find an answer inside of them. He drug his foot along the floor, his head dangling in regret as he watched it knock up a loose stone. She almost told him to stop breaking the floor.
"Lanny," he spoke up, his voice whispered out of his nose. She uncrossed her arms and stared at him, her face blank. Whatever he had to say couldn't reach her heart anymore, she'd buried it long ago. His pleading puppy eyes rounded up to hers and he asked, "Why were you in the deep roads alone?"
Lana stumbled back as if he struck her. How did he even...? Why would he...? Her mouth worked through every question she wanted to ask to shield her from the truth dangling over her head. If Alistair noticed her struggling to find her footing, he plowed past it.
"They," he jerked his head to the door in the wake of the others, "wouldn't know, probably think grey wardens head into the deep roads all by their lonesome for fun. But you can't fool me. Well, not about that."
She crossed her arms tighter across her chest, her fingers digging into her skin to ground herself. Hawke never asked, never wondered what she was doing surrounded by darkspawn without another warden in sight. If Anders knew, he didn't say anything. He seemed unable to care beyond his own nose. "I..." she whispered, her own foot knocking into the loose stone, "it was, I did what..."
Alistair gritted his teeth as if he had to swallow something bitter. Maybe for the first time in his life he did. He thought, always believed that if he did the right thing somehow the world would work to his advantage. There would be pain, there would be loss, but it would come out better. Lana learned the truth of it ages ago, that life wasn't a balance sheet and fair was a fairy tale. It was a shame it took the King of Ferelden this long to catch up. "You took the Calling," he sighed, his words damning her for her own weakness. For her inability to rise again from ashes, to be the hero everyone expected. How dare she not posses a will of steel in the face of any adversity? How dare she be human.
The old fire rose inside her, the kind only he could kindle. "Yes, I did. And you stand there in judgement of me, acting as if you are above it all. Beyond it. Can't feel it. No longer a warden, free to decide what is and isn't best for me. As if you aren't touched by anything anymore!"
"It's not your time," he shouted, his eyes flaring alive.
"That's not for you to decide!" she screamed back, rising up to face him dead on. "All you've ever done is decide my life for me. You were so certain you could take some noble high road and end things for my sake, to make it easier. Well look at how easy it is now!" Lana circled in front of him like a warship hunting for an opening.
"I thought you deserved better than being some sidepiece," he snarled back. "You do deserve better."
"What better, Alistair? What do I have in my life? The keep is lost, the wardens are consorting with demons, and you... What you did was unforgivable."
"I know," he sighed, crumpling from her accusations, "I shouldn't have started it up, shouldn't have encouraged..."
"Andraste's ass, you still don't get it."
"Get what? What am I missing, Lanny? Sorry, Lady Amell. You know what had to happen, what I had to do to take this damn crown, as if I wanted anything to do with it. I did what I thought was best for both of us, for you, so you could go on and find something, someone... You shouldn't be thought of as just a king's mistress."
Lana threw her head back and laughed, the tears streaming down her cheeks. As she gulped for air, her laugh merged into a gut wrenching sob, "You cut me loose so I could have the happy life, is that it? Settle down with someone of my choosing far away from all the politics and scheming? Tell me Alistair, what man would love a tainted grey warden? For the Maker's sake, what man would marry a mage?"
"I would if I weren't King!" he shouted back at her.
But Lana only snorted at that, "And weren't already married."
"Yeah, there is that bit too," he wiggled a pinkie in his ear as if that was only a minor problem. It took him a few years to finally pick a wife, despite Eamon all but dragging him to the altar right after his coronation. The woman he chose was nice and mercifully not too ambitious so she was unlikely to stab him in the night. Her main trait was nice with an overall blandness that in the face of his inopportune jokes would blink for a moment and then go about her day. It was the best he could hope for.
Lana shuddered from the weight of her sins. The murder, the magic, the calculated costs she could all bear in the name of the wardens but this one was her own damn doing. "I know you and the Queen have an 'understanding,' as you put it. I'd even believe it because I hope for the poor woman's sake she has someone else to warm her bed."
"Ouch, just ouch. You do go right for the throat, don't you?" Alistair interrupted.
"But..." Lana shook her head, trying to banish away all the emotion broiling below her skin. She slipped into Alistair's face and glared into his eyes, "your damn consort is a mage."
She watched the Oh shit! dawn across his face as his lips gawped like a fish out of water. Yes, she'd known of her, known even while they were being tossed across the Waking Sea in Isabela's ship. Even when she'd abandoned all common sense and bedded him as if his perceived future was a workable option. Her hope had blinded her to the truth.
Sliding away from Alistair, Lana grabbed onto the brass handle for the door. She yanked it open and spotted nearly every member of the advisers save Josephine standing outside trying to act as if they weren't listening in. Their guilty faces didn't even reach her, she was too far gone to see them. Turning back to Alistair, Lana said, "For the Maker's sake, do what's right. Give the Inquisition whatever they're asking for to stop Corypheus and stay out of my life forever."
Before anyone could respond, Lana stomped away from him for the last time.
* * *
Ice wrapped around the apple, the force of the spell knocking it higher into the air. Lana steadied her hand and launched a fire spell at it instead, melting the ice and bouncing the fruit back up into the ether. She'd been doing that for hours off the battlements, first ice, then heat, forever knocking an apple up against the inevitable fall. A few soldiers walked near her, wondering what the mad mage was up to, but none got too close once they saw who it was. Her reputation continued to precede her. The winds of Skyhold were blissful, only a light breeze altering her apple's course as it tried to trek over the walls, but Lana was ready for it. Rolling her arm underhand, she caught it with a fireball, knocking the fruit up. But her rebound ice caused the apple to wobble, its trajectory launching back towards the keep and the battlements below.
A hand lanced up and snatched the errant fruit out of the air. Cullen weighed the apple in his palms, the ice melting into his glove. Lana blinked at him, surprised but not that he'd come to find her. Then she yanked another apple from the bushel at her feet. She launched it into the air and began again.
"I forgot mages would do this," he said.
"Best way to practice channeling mana," Lana responded, her eyes on the prize. "I heard of one mage that found the perfect balance within himself. He could do it for hours - ice spell, fire, the ball barely dropped an inch." Her own spell lanced perpendicular across the apple's skin sending her target skittering off the keep's walls. It bounced against the rocks below, splattering next to a dozen of its brethren. "As you can see, that isn't me."
She reached for another when Cullen spoke up, "His... the king has left Skyhold. Volunteered what we needed to take Adamant and then insisted he needed to return to Ferelden before someone 'burned the place down.'"
The rotten apple scattered from her fingers, returning to the rest of its spoiled bushel. Lana glared at the crags below where she attempted to inefficiently make messy applesauce. "How much of that did you hear?"
"Ah...most of it," Cullen admitted. His fingers pushed into the skin of
the apple, easily bruising it after her magical maltreatments.
"Good," Lana crashed against the wall of the battlements and stared across the horizon. "It keeps me from having to repeat myself."
Cullen slipped beside her, not close enough to touch but within her personal bubble. When she'd left them all to deal with Alistair, she had no idea how he'd react to any of that. They'd barely grown been beyond the first blush stage of whatever this was. To see how he'd stand up to her past with a king was beyond her guess. Not many had to worry about that level of royal romantic history.
She rotated her fingers against the clouds, framing them as if she was about to cast a glyph over their cottony surface. "Seheron, where I was before returning to the Vigil, before finding it empty...it was a mission at his behest. What I'm going to tell you is, it's a secret. One of those national secrets I probably shouldn't share but, damn it, I don't care." Cullen's head gently nodded, he was prepared to accept it and she knew he would keep it safe.
"I didn't know what Alistair was up to at the time, only that he needed help breaking into an Antivan Crow prison. Maker, that man... There was a reason he was never in charge of planning things during the blight. Halfway through that mission, while neck deep in Crows, we learn that he drug us across thedas because," she sighed to steady herself, "he was going to find his father."
"His father? King Maric?" Cullen stuttered.
Of course, he'd have grown up with the tales of the great King Maric who wrested his birthright out of Orlesian hands. Cullen was a born and bred Ferelden boy. She knew of the king and his story from a few whispers among the senior enchanters, but he was as vague as Mafarath for Lana. Even knowing Alistair, having met Cailin, executed Loghain, the great king remained a distant star to her.
"It seemed there was some deal struck to bring Maric to Antiva. Witches and...it doesn't matter. Alistair and I, we'd been friends to that point. It wasn't an easy road after his idiotic decision post-Landsmeet, but I don't know. Maybe I wanted to believe I could move past all the awkwardness, trust that there was still good in him. No," Lana shook her head, blotting away her security blanket, "I'm lying to myself again."
She kicked her heel against the shattered wall behind her, the edge of her boot knocking thrice as she drug it down the cracks. "For a time I tried to be a warden, the warden, the warden everyone wanted. But I...Maker, I couldn't. I wasn't that woman. To cast a disinterested eye upon my people, to doom those to the same taint; it ate me up inside. And yet, that was my promise -- in exchange for my life, I was theirs. I tried other avenues to serve but not; research, finding ways to ease the blight itself. Perhaps cure it."
"White," Cullen whispered the name of the blood mage that temporarily brought them together.
Lana snickered at herself, "That failure reined me back in. I returned to the warden life, such as it was. Led parties through the deep roads, increased recruitment, waited upon the arling's throne for my own doom. And all the while my soul drifted. I even thought of returning to the circles." She rolled her eyes at Cullen, "You can guess what killed that idea dead."
"You were without a purpose," he whispered, the words clawing up his throat.
"Exactly. Then here comes an old love stepping back into my life, the one that got away. That old cliché. And he's talking about how if we find Maric we can reset everything that happened. Ignore the past ten years, put the rightful king on the throne and the two of us will... I don't know. Travel the world, take down bandits, right wrongs, maybe go pirate ourselves. He offered me an out, a freedom no one else had and I foolishly fell for it."
Cullen grabbed onto her hand, his gloves still cold from her ice, but she smiled through the bite. Her own thumb ran across his palm, trailing the glove's seams as if they were a river. "I'm guessing you did not find King Maric."
"Actually, we did, but..." Lana gulped from the macabre memory of what was left of the man. "He was drained for nearly twenty years by a batshit tevinter Magister...as if there are any other kind. After decades of torture, that level of stress placed upon the body, only a husk remained behind. The kind thing to do was to end his suffering. I knew it killed Alistair to do it, he'd put every last hope he had into finding his father. He, he always wanted a family. Losing that last hope was..."
She snapped her head, an anger welling up in her words. "I tried to help, to remind him that there were still options in this world. But why would he listen to me? Why would he care? And to have him turn around and do the same damn thing he did ten years ago."
Lana snatched up an apple from the bushel, poured all the fire she had inside of her into it, and launched it into the air. Smoke trailed the red plumes lancing off the burning apple flesh as it dashed across the bright blue sky into the snowy brink below. "He acted like he was protecting me, but I knew he was protecting his damn self. No one in their right mind wants a mage."
She reached for another apple, but Cullen caught her hand, his own apple plopping to the ground. Holding both, he knotted his fingers around hers while those amber eyes burned through her. He couldn't speak whatever was rolling through his brain, perhaps too many thoughts were crowding it out. She knew the feeling.
"So," she picked back up her tale as if speaking of another person entirely, "heartbroken, I accepted my fate and returned to my wardens. The rest you know."
Cullen's lips opened a few times, his mouth trying out the words so he could get them perfect. She shied away, trying to bury the fear itching along her skin. "Lana," he finally broke through the air, "What's the calling?"
Maker... Her eyes screwed up tight and she shook her head. No, out of everything in her life gone wrong, she couldn't tell him about that. Couldn't face him ever again if he knew.
"I thought it was the voice in your head, from the darkspawn, but the way you spoke of it. Screamed of it..."
The shameful tears burned behind her eyes, guilt ruddying up her cheeks and she glared at the floor. "It was... I." As if someone cut her strings, Lana plummeted to her knees. She didn't release her grip on Cullen, nor he on her, but he struggled to follow her fall. Pain jarred up her legs from her knees striking stone, but Lana shook it off like all the other injuries. "What did I have left?" she moaned through the tears, "No circles, no Alistair, no wardens. I had nothing to give. No reason to... And the voice, whispering in my thoughts. It could only mean, I had to..." She pawed at her nose, trying to wipe away the snot and her tears. Silence fell as she struggled to speak through the turmoil in her heart. In a broken voice, she explained, "Wardens don't die from the taint, we become corrupted. So, when our time comes, we take the Calling. We head into the deep roads alone and kill as many darkspawn as we can before we are, in turn, killed."
"Sweet Andraste," Cullen whispered. His fingers dug tighter into hers and he glanced away, not wanting her to see the emotion pouring off his face.
"I did it, I did the one thing you're never supposed to do. What no soldier must ever do. I gave up," Lana's lip wobbled despite her dead tone. The tears hazed up her vision, but she didn't have the strength to cry them. Her body was drained of nearly all life, her muscles falling slack until her head collapsed into her lap. "If it weren't for Hawke, I'd... Maker's breath, I was in that hole for two weeks and still I wouldn't die. Couldn't die. Refused to... I failed at that too."
"No," Cullen dropped to his knees now, his armor clanging from the plummet. His arms wrapped around her shoulders, pulling his chest into her bent head. "You fought with that spark in you, to keep going, to... You're still here."
"Still here," she repeated, her soul dead. "And nothing's changed. No circles, no...wardens. All I can do is try and stifle the voice, one way or another."
"I'm here," Cullen whispered. "Leliana. Hawke, as infuriating as she can be. You're not alone, I..."
Her fingers lifted from her lap to run across his face. It wasn't the most coordinated attempt as she accidentally brushed up his nose, but he caught her hand and pinned it tight to his cheek. "It's okay," Lana whispered,
"I'm past it. It was a year ago and I've moved on."
Cullen's eyes hunted across her as she lifted her head back and tried to force a smile. Was it true? A part of her thought it was, needed to believe it was. Otherwise, she shouldn't be let anywhere near a battlefield. A suicidal mage was a danger to everyone. The dark thoughts were there, had always been, but he was right, the people in her life kept her tethered here away from the void.
"I didn't want you to know because, because it was one more failure. More proof I'm not strong enough to..."
"Maker's breath, Lana. You don't need to always be strong."
"Neither do you," she volleyed back. He blinked rapidly from her change of topic, but didn't stammer to slide away from it.
"I...will try to remember that. It isn't easy when--"
She rose up from her lean and placed both hands around his jaw. Tenderly, Lana brought his forehead to hers. So close now she noticed the few tears streaking down his cheeks. "You're not alone either," she whispered.
Cullen exhaled, his arms locking around her back and he pulled her even tighter against his skin. They pressed together as if clutching to the only flotsam left floating in the midst of a storm. After a time, a small quirk of a smile twisted around Cullen's lips. "I am no longer with the templars," he stated the obvious. Lana broke away to stare into his eyes, confused by the change. "And you are no longer with the wardens."
"Oh," she shook her head, remembering her parting words to him what felt another lifetime ago. It'd been her way to put a pin in whatever they had, to let it be what it was and not wish for more. And yet... he was right. The very thing she thought would never come to pass did. "But, your heart is with the Inquisition now." Cullen's eyes narrowed for a moment as he watched her fall further away from him. For the first time since trudging up the battlements, Lana shook from the cold. "Duty is your life, I couldn't, wouldn't impede again..."
He sprung forward, his hands slipping tighter around her. "Do you know why I accepted the position of commander?" Lana shook her head, she'd assumed he needed it to get away from the templars. Perhaps to free himself from Kirkwall. "After six years of losing myself to Meredith's madness, I couldn't entrust myself to someone like that again. Someone I didn't know, that could easily twist me back into a...what I never wish to be."
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