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Chapter 8: Oh, the Horror!

Summary:

All is going well as Cullen and Dorian escort Empress Celene to safety.

Until it's not.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Oh, the Horror!

Everything was going swimmingly, right up until it wasn’t. Oh, the trio made it quite easily through dark, web-infested passageways that’d lain unused since Briala’s exploration of them some year past. Cullen teased Dorian about cobwebs rather mercilessly until he reminded the commander that he’d catch more flies with honey. Cullen advised that spiders probably caught more flies with their webs than he would with honey and it devolved from there.

Both men were graced with being the first to hear Empress Celene Valmont belly laugh for the first time since she was fifteen. They called it a win and moved on, eager to be done with the ferrying of royalty through deep, dark, dank and unspeakable places, and get back to the earlier activities they’d been enjoying when so rudely interrupted by the unthinkable.

It took nearly three hours by foot through caves that did indeed have not-normal-sized spiders, which Dorian so often complained of whenever the Inquisitor led her companions into caves and tunnels and abandoned ruins and the like, but eventually the ruler of Orlais, the commander of the Inquisition’s forces and a runaway Tevinter altus made it to a large, weathered wooden door that was runed to only be able to be unlocked by a particular magical spell that they had to hunt for thirty-five minutes to piece together from various and sundry clues scored into the walls around them. Dorian loved puzzles. Cullen loved helping him solve them. Celene stood by and watched with half a smile on her face conveying her firm belief that she and the Inquisitor had chosen her protectors well.

Dorian cast the spell. The door swung open.

There stood Gaspard, a smile evident beneath his mask.

Celene, Cullen and Dorian froze for a fraction of a second until Gaspard breathed out, “Well, well, well, cousin. We meet at last away from the wagging tongues and prying eyes of those who would make you their hamstrung puppet.” His eyes flicked to Cullen and Dorian as the former unsheathed his sword and unseated his shield, and the latter grasped his staff.

“That will not be necessary, gentlemen,” Gaspard de Chalons advised, voice dripping with the sort of fake kindness Dorian was used to and Cullen detested. “For you see, no matter how hard you fight, it will be of no consequence to the outcome. Celene will die, you will be framed and come the dawn, Orlais’ rightful Emperor will sit upon her throne at last.”

Dorian cut his eye at Cullen, who said, “Time to earn our pay, mage?”

Dorian made a face. “You get paid for this shite?”

They heard two daggers unsheathe behind them and grinned at the idea of prim and proper Celene royally fucking the usurper with a couple of undoubtedly expensive daggers. “How did you even get away?” Cullen asked to distract the Duke. “You were supposed to be bound over for a death sentence.” He saw Celene scoot unobtrusively up behind them, her shoulders touching his left and Dorian’s right.

“It’s very easy to bribe those my cousin relies on for security if you know where all the skeletons are buried,” Gaspard bragged.

“There will soon be another in this very spot to join them,” Dorian remarked, immediately casting a barrier around himself, Cullen and Celene, who parried forward and slid between Gaspard’s spread-planted legs, bouncing up behind him and riposting his upper spine while Cullen’s sword drove straight into his gut.

“Why do I think,” Cullen asked as he yanked his sword away from the Duke, whose body thumped several times as several different parts of him hit the stone floor in an uneven pattern, “that he wasn’t the one we need worry about?”

“Because you’re right, as you have often been, Ser Knight-Captain,” replied an all-too-familiar voice.

Celene whirled around, but a shield slammed against the side of her head mid-movement. She fell unconscious to the floor.

The sounds of melee further behind the voice which had spoken echoed round the cavern and tunnels that lay beyond this entrance to the Deep Roads, but Dorian was paying it little mind, for his eyes were on Cullen, who roared like the Fereldan lion he was, and charged at their newly-appeared and well-known foe.

Samson made to separate Cullen’s head from his person, but Dorian screamed, “No!” and sent a bolt of electricity through the red templar from head to toe, electrocuting him where he stood. This allowed Cullen to attempt the same maneuver on his one-time friend, but Samson’s red lyrium-infused strength and resilience saw him recover much more quickly from the magic hit even as Dorian called a spirit into Gaspard’s body and reanimated him to stab Samson with his longsword.

Samson ducked Cullen’s swipe. Dorian cast a horror spell upon Samson that didn’t affect him at all. He wove the Fade round and round his hands, calling forth nearly every bit of mana he had, and shoved it forward just as Cullen leapt into the air to make a killing blow at the spot where he calculated Samson would be felled by Dorian’s gale force wind slam. Cullen was never wrong with his calculations, and Dorian’s spells were never miscast.

But Samson knew Cullen way, way better than Dorian did. And he had been told what’d transpired on the ballroom floor between his former roommate and the disgusting Tevinter mage. So Samson threw a red lyrium dagger right at Dorian’s face, at the very moment when Gaspard’s corpse shoved its sword through Samson’s right thigh.

But Dorian saw the dagger headed for his eye too late to duck.

Cullen, however, saw it in time to intercept. He twisted his body midair like a rogue performing the most unbelievable acrobatic feats, head coming within an inch of the lyrium dagger’s blade, and reached out with his nearest hand, the one that held his longsword. The dagger glanced off its pommel and in the blink of an eye had embedded itself in Cullen’s jugular as his shoulders headed for the floor beneath it, shoving it even further into his neck.

By the time he hit the ground, bounced once, twice and then came to a complete rest, he’d already lost half his blood volume.

Dorian yelled out a spell he had never before cast but knew would work as surely as he knew his own name and as certainly as he knew how much he loved the man whose life force was pooling beneath him faster than the Tevinter knew could be stopped. He called forth the power of that pure, knightly blood, swirling it round and round him and continuing to yell words in Tevene that no one present could understand.

Celene, just coming to, scrabbled to Samson, trying to pull the sword from his leg even as Gaspard’s corpse died a second time, and everyone fighting around them stopped and stared in abject horror at the spectacle of six rage demons, six shades and six abominations courtesy of six of Samson’s red templars being corrupted by demons, rising from the floor. The entire complement of Inquisition and loyal-to-Celene soldiers laid into every last one of the men Samson had brought with him to kill both Gaspard and Celene.

And Cullen.

Dorian fell to his knees at Cullen’s side, knowing full well that every dead body was rising skeletonized as soon as it fell, to take up the fight on the Inquisition’s behalf. Hearing very clearly Cassandra’s curses and the Inquisitor’s cries of “Cullen!” and “Dorian!” as she frantically searched for them.

Samson got down on one knee and sneered at him. “You see, mage, Knight-Commander Meredith was right after all. Any one of you magickers can fall to blood magic if your reasoning is good enough. You just proved it.” He nodded down at Cullen, whose very last breaths were shuddering from between his lips. “Good thing ‘e’s not ‘ere to witness such a betrayal, innit?”

Dorian looked up and he wasn’t altogether certain what face he was wearing, but whatever it was must’ve terrified the General of Corypheus’ forces, for Samson’s eyes widened as Dorian laughed long, low and with so much venom that he could almost smell the putridity of hatred leaking from his every pore.

“You won’t be living long enough to tell him anyway,” Dorian growled.

Just as Samson made to stand again, a lightning bolt appeared in Dorian’s left hand as solidly as a sword and in one swift move he sliced it horizontally across Samson’s body.

At first, Samson sneered at him, thinking nothing had happened. Then, slowly, everything above his waist slid right and everything below it slid left, and with a look of disbelief etched upon his face as a final epitaph, both halves fell to the floor dead.

Dorian laid his right hand upon Cullen’s hair and dipped all five fingertips of his left hand into the blood surrounding him. “Maker, hear me now and take me to his spirit.” Then he lowered his head and kissed Cullen’s temple, murmuring, “Iudicionte tuo redamat et unitas corporis et vinilim fecit benedictione mea voluntasore fiatalus.”

Just like that, Dorian – and Cullen’s body – were gone.


Cullen stood with his back to him, arms folded over his chest, looking out from the cliff upon which they stood to the place Dorian knew he loved best in the Hinterlands. A private spot frequented by few where the view of three waterfalls could be seen from this very rise. A place fortified on three sides by mountains tall enough to afford complete protection save from a single pass leading into this untouched, pristine land good for farming and grazing alike.

He knew Cullen wanted to spend his post-Inquisition years helping his fellow templars break what Cassandra had so appropriately once called their lyrium leashes. He knew that Cullen wanted to do it in the Hinterlands, and he knew this was the place Cullen dreamed of one day building the lodge that would accommodate as many templars as needed. A place that would give honest, paying, safe work to mages and the common mundane alike.

The number of lives he could help salvage, he’d often remarked, was nearly innumerable.

Except he was dead now, and thus it would never come to pass.

Cullen didn’t turn and look at him. He didn’t speak. Simply watched his waterfalls as Dorian looked round and saw a distant orb of light. He knew at once who and what that orb was, as though some inner knowledge was suddenly being released and so very many things were being made clear. “Maker! This man has done no wrong. I offer an exchange!”

The orb drew closer. Cullen did not move.

A booming voice came from everywhere at once when it spoke thus, “You offer yourself that he should live.”

“I do.”

“You have resorted to means that you cursed your own father for, in order to bring justice to the one who slew this, my own Champion of Righteousness.”

“I have, Maker, and it brings my life to forfeit even so.”

“What makes you think he wishes to return, when he could have a life free of the torment of nightmares and memories, headaches and pain, here by my side as you see with your own eyes, necromancer?”

“I call upon the dead to suffer the pains of evil no longer,” Dorian protested. “I call across the smallest whispers of spirits barely formed to see ended any who seek to stop the Inquisitor fulfilling her duty to bring peace to all Thedas.”

“You think to convince me of a Tevinter’s righteousness? When one of your own who originally broke through the veil and turned me away from my own children, shadows your Inquisition like the Dread Wolf shadows the souls of elvhen departed?”

“I am not my countrymen, past, present or future. And I wish for nothing but this man’s goodness returned to the Inquisition, for he is irreplaceable and you know it as well as I.”

“Which means you have pre-judged your own life to be just the opposite.”

“What am I, but an abomination in every sense of the word save possession? I corrupt, I falter, I tempt others, I give in to temptation myself – even to blood magic – when it is my sworn oath to never bring a drop of blood to bear upon my magic. Even in that I fail.”

“You think to call sacrificing everything you believe, have sworn fealty to and love, failure, Altus?”

“The chantry would say yes.”

“The chantry speaks with their own demons of pride and power at the forefront of their thoughts. It speaks not for me and has not done since its inception. Have you not spoken of this very same subject with the Inquisitor?”

The orb circled round him. It then zoomed across some twenty, thirty feet to circle round Cullen, who still did not move or even acknowledge whether he knew anyone else was present. Then it returned, light so blinding that Dorian had to close his eyes and look away, using his forearm to shield himself from its brightness.

“You made him happy, as he made you.”

Tears sprang to Dorian’s eyes. “I have never laughed so much in all my nearly thirty-one years as I did in the past many months with him by my side.”

“You made his fight against lyrium bearable. Healed him. Helped him. Showed him he was worthy of love.”

“I did what little I could. I would do anything. Give anything. He deserves to be worshiped, all respect to yourself, of course.”

Dorian looked up in surprise as the blinding white orb shifted and then coalesced into the most beautiful man he had ever seen. He stood at least one foot taller than Dorian, if not more, and wore very little, showcasing the most perfect musculature, the softest-looking shoulder-length wavy blond hair and brightest, bluest sparkling eyes and forbidden-to-touch plump lips that could possibly exist on anyone.

“The temptation you fear is not come to pass, for you see me but think only of him.” The human-looking, glowing creature identifying itself as the Maker reached out and cupped Dorian’s face. “You feel me, but you think only of him laying his own hand in this very place just before he leaned in to kiss you not a handful of hours before.”

Tears leaked from Dorian’s eyes, sliding down his cheeks, chest heaving, almost spasming in grief. “Take me, Maker. Please. Allow me to give him this last thing that I can, and I shall do all that you require as payment in return.”

“There is so much that Cullen has left to do in my name, for his own nature to heal,” the Maker stated, looking over at what Dorian realized was actually flesh-and-blood Cullen already restored, simply held in some sort of timeless stasis, as best he could gather. Then the impossibly tall and beautiful creator of all that existed looked back at him and asked, “You would give anything for me to restore he whose life has been ended too soon?”

“Anything. My life. More, if possible.”

“Without hesitation, I see.”

“Gladly. With all my heart.” Dorian knelt before him. “He means everything to me. To so many people he hasn’t even met yet.”

“Indeed, you see his path clearly, Altus. And what of yours?”

Dorian looked up and met the Maker’s eyes. “That depends entirely on you.” And then he looked down, praying with everything that he was. Closing his eyes. Remembering that moment, that defining, beautiful, perfect moment with his back against Cullen’s front, his head upon Cullen’s shoulder, Cullen’s eyes meeting his and closing the gap to kiss him for the first time at the end of their Dark Waltz. The Dark Waltz, at the conclusion of which the dancer’s partner dies despite his love having spent the entire dance trying to convince him to stay.

How ironic.

How appropriate.

A bright flash of light, a crack of thunder inside his skull, and Dorian knew no more.

Notes:

Yes, Cullen is literally left at the edge of a cliff for this, a cliffhanger. Stay tuned!