My Love

by Sabrina Zbasnik

  Rolling off the man, Cullen staggered to his feet and shouted for Honor, "No! Give it here! Now!" For a moment his dog's tail wagged as she thought this was a new game, but Cullen growled, his voice sneering through a panic as he crossed the distance to her to hold his hand out. "Drop it!" Her black eyes rolled up and gingerly Honor released the phylactery into his hand. Maker, that was close. If she'd broken it, they'd have had no way to find...

  The sun's last rays reflected against the black liquid giving it a hopeful orange sheen, but he knew it wasn't real. He couldn't feel the presence calling to him, guiding him further west. He never would again because it was dead, she was dead. Cullen's fingers skimmed along the top of Honor's head as he limped towards the setting sun. The king shouted something, but he couldn't hear it, didn't want to hear it. Two years, he'd grieved for two years, and yet...

  By the light of Andraste, he'd held on to some foolish hope that she'd survive. Out of all the people in all of thedas, who else but Lana Amell could travel through the fade for six months, then a year, then two, and come out of it alive, whole? With his knee unable to withstand anymore, Cullen collapsed to the ground. A gentle slope to the bottom the hill waited below, the grasses waving goodnight to the sun. Before him wafted the pinks and oranges of the beginnings of dusk, but he didn't care - his eyes were only upon the phylactery squeezed between both of his palms.

  Lana, please...I can't go it alone anymore. I need-- Maker and his bride Andraste, why? Why did you take her? She was, she could have been... The world needs her, has always needed her.

  Please, give her back. Please.

  I need her.

  I love her.

  Cullen repeated that in his head, her dead phylactery pressed against his lips as he prayed for it to give him hope, to spring back to life, to shine its ruby light across the darkening hills. To prove that damned bastard right. How could he go back? What life remained without her?

  An old memory stirred in the back of his mind as he pressed the phylactery against his trembling lips. In the depths of the deep roads, he asked her something completely out of a place because he feared he'd never have the chance again. "What was it like finding Andraste's ashes?"

  She paused in scraping deepstalker off her staff blade and looked over at him. "It's not an easy thing to answer."

  "Oh," Cullen backed down, trying to hide the hurt.

  As if sensing the pain, she ran her fingers up his forearm, her touch barely reaching him through the grey warden padding. "People want to hear that it was glorious, soul affirming, a truly holy experience."

  "And it wasn't?"

  Lana tipped her head back and forth, "It depends. There were tests, challenges to see if I was worthy, as if faith can be proven by answering a trivia challenge and fighting your shadow self. But..." Her chin dipped down and Lana pulled away from him. Staring deeper down the abandoned deeproads, she rubbed her hands up her arms as if she was freezing. "My parents were as devout Andrastians as one can get in the countryside. When I first entered the tower I had no idea why I was there. I didn't understand." Lana snorted and shook her head, "I thought I was being punished for doing something bad. I suppose in a way I was. Mages were bad, I knew that, but I didn't understand it. Those evil tevinter magisters who killed our beloved Andraste revolved in the same realm as bogeymen for me. Then suddenly I'm pulled away from my family, my home, my own country and I...I learn I'm one of those bogeymen."

  Rolling her fingers, a ball of ice coalesced in the palm of her hand the water so pure it glittered like crystal. "That self hatred, it doesn't go away overnight. I don't know if it ever really does," Lana sighed, dropping her crystal ball against the ground. It shattered into pieces, the shards blanketing her shoe. "Andraste's the reason I was in the tower, or those who'd invoke her name and speak for her, at least. I should hate her, find her temple to be little more than a farce cooked up by a mad cult with more time than brains on their hands."

  Cullen nodded. He heard the same from so many other mages forced to attend chantry services and all but revolting to get out of it. Over time, the enchanters were given leeway to skip services and most preferred avoiding them. The pews filled with templars fulfilling their vows, the initiates, the apprentices forced to be there, and -- strangely enough -- senior enchanters nearing their end of days who'd step back into the lady's light.

  But Lana wasn't finished. She nudged her shoe across the broken ice and watched as she tried to piece it together. "And yet, I braved all those trials, the dragon cult, the riddles, spoke to a false Jowan because I believed the ashes would save Arl Eamon. Whether they were hers or not, whether Andraste was real or not, I had to have faith that it would work to even try." Her beguiling brown eyes turned up to his and she spoke, "Is that not what true faith is, belief without proof? Trusting that in your heart there is hope? That's what I got from the Temple of Sacred Ashes, but it's not what people ever want to hear."

  Belief without proof. He'd thought upon it from time to time, when his own faith wavered like a banner in the wind, when he clung by his fingernails to the hope that there was good in the world, there was righteousness, there was justice. Cullen needed all of those to be as real as Andraste, perhaps even more real.

  Tears dribbled down his cheek, washing clean the blood left from the skin split apart in the fight. A single drop, tainted crimson from his own blood, splattered against the black phylactery. He watched the bloody tear wobble against the glass while his hands tried to hold the bottle still. A pinprick of light glinted off the blood drop and Cullen craned his head up to see that the sun finally gave up the sky to let night and a blanket of stars fill the air above him.

  "In the long hours of the night, when hope has abandoned me, I will see the stars and know Your Light remains," Cullen repeated the prayer while wiping his blood off Lana's phylactery. A red stain remained behind along with a promise.

  He found Alistair where he left him, a water skin pressed to his swollen jaw as he stared dejected across the landscape. Cullen approached with as much noise as he could make, but the king didn't look up. Pausing beyond the man's personal space, Cullen coughed, "I'm sorry I struck you."

  "I know I had it coming. Had it coming for years," the king's voice was stripped, as blank as fresh vellum. Cullen had no idea if he meant it or felt he needed to say it to keep him from...Maker, did he really threaten the life of a king? What would happen to him now?

  "So..." Alistair didn't turn to face him, his eyes gazing out upon the Imperium they left behind. "What now?"

  "You lied about this," Cullen stepped around him to thrust the phylactery into his eyes, his fingers gripping tight to the glass.

  "Technically you never asked," he shrugged, the sleazy grin of a child trying to escape punishment flashing across his battered face. Screwing his eyes up tight, Alistair pulled the water skin away revealing a cheek swollen to almost pitch black. "I don't know why it does that, but... Andraste's big toe, the first time I found her phylactery glowing I thought it had to be a trick. Someone replaced hers as a joke or, I don't know... I didn't believe it and was too scared to touch it. But it's her, that's all Lanny, nothing else. I felt her, you can't tell me you didn't as well."

  Cullen gulped, his vision drawn to the glug of black liquid inside the phylactery. It was true.

  "For the first time in two years I thought, I can fix this. I'll find Lanny, wherever she's gone, I'll bring her back. Then, it did that. Faded away in my hands, as if...as if she died in my arms," the king jammed the water skin tight to his left eye hoping that could mask the falling tears, forgetting the same fell from his right. "I get it, with the punching and anger and all, it killed me inside too. Holy Maker, He gave me this once chance and I wasn't fast enough. I couldn't move any mountains or divert the right river to save her. Failed before I even tried. I'd intended to give it all up, and then, clear as day, it burst back into life - ruby red and all, the light begging for someone to save her, to find her."

  "Phylacteries do n
ot behave in this manner," Cullen said. His throat constricted from the raw words rising up it, the logic like steel wool scratching its way to his mouth.

  "Lanny's not just a mage. Maybe the, I don't know, the taint is messing with it. Or it's breaking down because it wasn't kept in a fancy templar storage crypt for years. Or..." Alistair dug his fingers into the grass, yanking it up in clumps.

  Or something was holding Lana in a terrifying limbo - not alive, but not dead either. Cullen met the king's eyes haunted by a memory he couldn't understand, a shudder climbing across the king's broken shoulders. They had to find her. If that was the case, they had to free her.

  Fingers pausing in mutilating the grassland, Alistair turned up to face him, his right eye narrowing, the left blocked by the water skin. "What do you intend to do, templar?"

  "I..." What was he going to do? He come to make amends to try and preserve something of the Inquisition's reputation, but-but what now? Squaring his shoulders, his chin lifting, Cullen dipped into nearly three years of command at the Inquisition's sword arm. "I will reach the end of this. If Lana is in any sort of danger or..." He gulped as the image of her body, emaciated and broken from two years chained in a lightless dungeon, flashed before him. "I will do everything in my power to save her, if it is possible. But there are conditions. First," Cullen tipped the phylactery side to side, "this will remain upon my person at all times."

  He expected the king to argue, but instead the man snickered, "Go ahead. You can feel her die, come back to life, then die again every ten or twelve hours."

  "Second, there are no more secrets."

  "In general or about the phylactery? Because you know all I do about that and...if you want to know everything about me it's going to take some time. Let's see, I was born on a rainy Tuesday to a scullery maid in--"

  Cullen threw a hand up, hoping it would silence the man. "I do not care where you came from, nor if you will return. We are not friends of any shade."

  "Yeah, kinda figured that out when you were about to crack my skull open with your fist."

  The color drained from Cullen's cheeks, his brain screaming at him that this man was his king. Even with the protection of the Inquisition, Alistair could enact his wrath upon Cullen's family in Honnleath if he wished. "You were quick to brandish your dagger," his tongue rolled out, unable to find any proper excuse for his actions.

  Then, the strangest thing happened. With lips split open, his cheek so swollen it knotted up his eye, still wheezing from the pummeling against his ribs, the king of Ferelden broke out into a laugh. A chortle at first, it gained momentum with each gasp for air until he was wiping different tears out of his eyes. "Maker, I bet I look like warmed over cat barf. And you, you're like hitting a brick wall. Do you wear armor under your clothes?"

  Throbbing rose up through his knee, the one the king smashed in without a second thought. Shrugging at the inanity of it all, Cullen sat in the grass beside Alistair but not near him. "I never expected royalty to punch with the force of a dragon."

  "Ha! You've never pissed off Celene then. Or that king in Antiva. She's a real scrapper. I'd ask why a woman's a king there, but they have too many assassins and I prefer my liver not kebobed for my entertainment."

  No one said the word truce, Cullen doubted he'd believe it from the man's lips anyway, but the tension wafted towards the stars as both men fell into silence. Honor flopped down beside him, grateful her two favorite people were no longer at war with each other. Her tongue lapped at the grass stains against Cullen's arms, a clump of mud falling into her gaping maw. It vanished before he had a chance to tell her not to eat it.

  Without saying a word, Alistair passed Cullen his water skin. He held it for a moment, not feeling particularly thirsty, when the king jabbed a finger to indicate Cullen's jaw. Tracing his palm along the new beard, pain shattered into his teeth and inside his ear. Cullen held the skin against what was probably already a black and blue bruise, the cooler water oozing some of the sting away.

  "We're quite a pair right now," Alistair joked and Cullen found himself agreeing. "What we need is a healer mage." He laughed at the idea and then a terrified look crossed his eyes, "We can never tell Lanny about this."

  "Agreed," Cullen said tipping his head. Then he smiled and shifted the water skin to his swollen knee, "She'd be angry at missing it."

  "Maker's breath, you are not kidding there. For being a mage, that woman has a real fondness for bloodsport. During the blight we fought in the dwarven, I don't know what they call it, death ring. Why? Was it for gold? Nope. To help get some bearded ass on their throne for our army? No. She just really wanted to fight. That woman scares me sometimes. Most times."

  That he knew to be true. While she could easily have spent her days hidden in the library of Skyhold, Lana was often found lingering near the sparring yards. She rarely stayed long, as if she knew she shouldn't be there, yet she kept finding an excuse to drop by as the Inquisition's passable squared off. Cullen thought after Adamant he'd offer to teach her a few sword tricks. His heart constricted at that thought - to watch her eyes light up in joy from learning something new, to kiss her while her lips rose in a smile infecting his own, to hold her close -- her back pinned against him while he guided her hand.

  "You said has instead of had," Cullen whispered.

  "What was that?"

  "When mentioning Lana, you used has and scares - present tense instead of..."

  Alistair brushed back his hair, dusting it with the plucked grass, "I guess I did. I need it to be true, the world it's... It's not the same without her, it's not right. It's empty."

  The pain in Cullen's knee and face was nothing compared to the shattered glass in his soul -- its tatters he feared could only be cured with Lana's touch. Dropping his head to his chest, he whispered, "I did ask."

  "Hm? What's that?"

  "After Corypheus was finished, I approached the Inquisitor and asked if he'd be willing to open the fade so we could search for Lana," Cullen screwed his eyes up. It took him days to work up the courage, even knowing the dangers it could inflict upon the world and his own training screaming against such dark magic, he had to try. "He refused after they received a letter from you about Lana's phylactery being black."

  The king blinked his un-swollen eye rapidly and touched his forehead, "I never sent any letter about her phylactery, or even... Ah, damn Leliana, and her damn network of spies. She must have had some of them take a peek in and report back without bothering to ask me. They're freaking everywhere too, probably baked into pies and scurrying in mouse holes all over thedas."

  After the Inquisitor less than gently refused, Cullen convinced himself that even if they'd sent a contingency of their best into the fade, the chances of finding Lana would have been impossible. The fade was endless and they had no hope to stumble upon a solitary mage among the thousands of demons. "I should have pushed harder," Cullen grumbled, pressing the water skin tightly to his knee. Lifting his head, Cullen spotted the wolf constellation Fenrir, its three stars pointing in the direction of what had to be Draconis' left toenail. All of that meant east, towards whoever or whatever held Lana.

  "I should have too," Alistair sighed back. "Thrown that kingly weight around to do something good for once. What are a few demons to save the Hero of Ferelden?"

  Pressing his fingers against the glass that gave no sign of life, no hint of hope, Cullen swallowed deep and dropped his head, "She wouldn't have wanted us to risk it. She wouldn't have wanted us to risk even this."

  "That's what she gets for not being here."

  Andraste, Cullen prayed against the glass of the phylactery, he'd give anything for her to be here now. Above them the light of the Maker glittered, the stars waiting patiently to lead them on to ruin or, perhaps, the salvation he begged for.

  Chapter Twenty

  Memory - Stars

  9:30 Kinloch Hold

  He was supposed to be patrolling along the roof following a set pattern worn into the soles of ev
ery templar. Their assignments rarely deviated beyond the occasional mage spell gone awry or the even rarer runner. By this time of night, Cullen should have circled past the slanted roof section that bore a resemblance to a nose and slipped down to the lower eaves off the northern edge. Instead, he stood just out of the circle of lantern light while a pair of mages sat upon the frozen roof's tiles. One stared up at the night sky, while the man beside her kept unearthing small bits of gravel to toss off the roof.

  "It's freezing out here," he complained. Jowan. Normally, Cullen wouldn't much care about him as he blended into the average rank of troublemakers, but he was always in the range of...

  "Then warm yourself. It's an easy enough spell," she flitted her hand towards him but didn't look over. All her attention was upon the stars enveloped in a smattering of clouds. Various books piled across her lap each begging for attention. At such a tiny size, only two could really rest upon her thighs, but she tried to keep a third one balanced anyway. It wasn't going well.

  Jowan grumbled from her answer. He didn't want suggestions, he wanted to leave. Ever since they first popped out of the hatch on the roof, he'd been complaining loudly about the cold, the wind, and anything else to get them inside. She waved each grievance away as inconsequential. "I don't know why I came. It's not as if you need me."

  "Because you owed me, and you know why you have to be here."

  "Yes, yes. Rules," he slapped his hands against his thighs, watching his stretched out feet knock together. Cullen couldn't see her beyond that halo of curly ebony hair bent downwards, then up, as she kept a tally in her book.

  "What's even the point?" Jowan began again, getting a sigh of impertinence in response. "You can't see the thing you're looking for with all these clouds."