Fic: "Two Roads" Dragon Age Alistair/Loghain - Chapter 11
Authors: ac1d6urn and sinick
Summary: Alistair's adventure in applied alchemy.
Alternative links: AO3 ffn
Chapter 1: The Spirit Charm
Chapter 2: The Ruins of Lothering
Chapter 3: The Canticle of Shartan
Chapter 4: The Map Case
Chapter 5: Of Cheese and Chasind
Chapter 6: The Fade
Chapter 7: Names
Chapter 8: Flames
Chapter 9: Two Swords
Chapter 10: Pyrrhic Victory
Two Roads
Chapter 11: Life and Death... And What Comes After
Right, Alistair thought. I'm in charge. I have to stay in control. Everything's up to me now.He took a deep breath. He knew better than to feel sure that this sort of stern mental talk would be enough to dissolve his unease. Still, I suppose it's worth a try, he told himself.
Turned out, it wasn't enough, not by a long shot. Alistair exhaled, and there it was still: that heartstopping, mindchilling pressure of holding a helpless man's life in his hands. What if I make a mistake? Maker! Mistakes happen all the time, when you least expect them. But if I do something wrong now, then Loghain will be the one who pays the price.
He shook his head. Enough! No time to think about that now. We've got to get out of here!
It helped just a bit to focus outwards, on the fact that Dog was ahead of them, leading, that Loghain's horse made its way downhill without so much as a nudge from Alistair.
The lowlands were shrouded in fog, thick enough to limit visibility in a worrying way. It was a marked change after the pitiless snow-covered glare of Ostagar. The path passed through spindly stands of conifers, forcing Alistair to duck low-hanging prickly branches that loomed suddenly out of the mist to shower him with dew and cobwebs. He winced and clawed sticky strands off his face. More cobwebs dangled from wet branches, grey as the mist, beaded with foggy droplets and thin enough to stretch and tear at a touch: nothing like the deadly snares spun by giant spiders. Alistair remembered all too well how Loghain once spoke to him of spidersilk, his voice lulling Alistair into an awed near-trance with its danger and possibility. But these webs were only ever spun to trap bugs, not humans.
Aside from a few brief glimpses of thankfully un-Blighted wolves, all was quiet. Alistair's constant, worried search of the taint yielded no sense of danger, nothing apart from the faintest possible glimmer from the man slumped against his chest, lolling slightly to and fro in the circle of his arms. Not that Alistair was much steadier in the saddle than Loghain: he fought his own exhaustion until the slow, cautious pace of the horse picking its way between patches of swamp finally lulled him into a daze, nodding on the brink of sleep.
Maybe we should head for the highway. It's where people would be, he thought blearily. But it seemed even the horse and Dog supported his earlier choice. The mabari trotted along narrow paths left untrodden for seasons, heading onward, ever deeper into seemingly unexplored wilderness. But Alistair had been here before: he remembered the hidden paths Morrigan had taken when she'd led Solona and him through these wilds to her mother's hut.
That hut was the closest shelter Alistair knew.
Where is it? Alistair peered blearily through the swirling fog. We should've reached it by now. His mind was sluggish with exhaustion, just as his arms were weighed down by a comatose man.
Ah-ha! At last, from under heavy eyelids, Alistair glimpsed a small patch of ruins, and a crooked hut which leaned against a half-destroyed stone wall, its shape slumped as if it was as weary as he was. The shack looked and sounded rickety enough to tumble down in the next storm, if it wasn't for the wall propping it up on one side and tall trees crowding around it, all of them shielding the shack from the worst of the weather. Or perhaps the hut was held up by magic: there must've been plenty of magic here, plenty of ritual blood and lyrium spilt over this patch of land. For all of Flemeth's wickedness, Alistair had never sensed the faintest hint of darkspawn taint here: not in the land, not in its inhabitants. Apparently she had protected her home every bit as warily as Morrigan had warded her tent, and that protection had lingered even after the old witch's death.
"Hello?" Alistair called out half-heartedly, just to see if anyone else had moved into the abandoned house. Dog barked once, sniffed at the hut, and turned back to Alistair, not paying much more attention to the structure, nor the squeaky door hanging partially off the hinges and swaying in the wind, never quite closing shut.
Alistair hoped that despite the general air of disrepair, the hut would still be sound enough to shelter them from the storms that happened all too often in the Wilds. With luck, it wouldn't be much worse than a barn, and Alistair had learned every trick to making barns livable when he was a boy.
First things first. He dismounted by the entrance to the hut and caught Loghain as he slumped off the horse's neck. Alistair sank to his knees under Loghain's weight, settling him outstretched on the ground.
Alistair sat there for a moment, panting, gathering his strength, before standing and approaching the hut as warily as if it were a sleeping dragon. He reached out toward the hut with all of his templar-trained abilities, in case Flemeth had returned from the Fade to haunt the place. Apart from a few creaks from the hut's aged wood as it swayed slightly in the wind, there was no reaction.
Huh. Nothing. First lucky break I've had in ages, Alistair thought, as he turned away from the hut toward the man lying pale and still on the ground. C'mon, then, Sleeping Beauty, he thought with an inward smirk as he bent to grasp Loghain under the arms, let's get you inside.
He staggered into the hut, dragging Loghain with him, then heaving him up onto the hut's solitary bed. As Alistair's breathing returned to normal after the exertion, he stretched to work the kinks out of his back, and looked around himself.
Apart from the bed, the hut contained only a few chests - all of which they'd opened and emptied after dragon Flemeth's demise - and some shelves of suspicious ingredients and unidentifiable potions. Grimoires weighted down a makeshift table of boards resting on small barrels. Skulls - maybe darkspawn, maybe human - were covered with waxy drips from burned-down candles. Animal skins covered the walls and floor, instead of tapestries and rugs. Herbs and bulbs and roots hung from the low ceiling all around. Some of the roots looked like dried-out human hands, some of the bulbs seemed half-eaten, but there was a perfectly ordinary braid of garlic among them, as well as strings of deep mushrooms, elfroot and deathroot. Alistair would've been heartened to see them, but they were all shrivelled and gray with dust, far too old to be useful. A cobwebbed cauldron hung over the long-cold fireplace. Alistair came closer to peer into it, and wrinkled his nose. Whatever the contents had once been, now they were just a rancid black scum. He hastily carried the cauldron outside and dumped it well away from the hut.
The horse looked exhausted as he walked over to remove the saddlebags and unsaddle it. He scratched its forelock and mentally promised it a good currycomb once he'd caught up on some of his own sleep. For now, he just tethered it to a tree, in a grassy spot by the edge of the nearest pool.
The mabari followed Alistair inside, leaving wet muddy pawprints alongside Alistair's muddy boot prints and the drag marks from Loghain's heels. The dog shook the worst of the soil from his thick fur and hopped up onto the foot of Loghain's bed, settling there like a silent, hairy guardian as Alistair barricaded the door.
He looked down at Loghain. The man was shivering and a faint frown creased his brows. Alistair tugged the blanket over him, then bent without much hope to peer under the bed. But then he gave a "Ha!" of surprised triumph and dragged out a second blanket, coughing at the resulting cloud of dust as he spread that blanket over Loghain as well. He rummaged through their saddlebags then held a water skin to Loghain's mouth, trying to get him to drink. Loghain's skin felt clammy and cold, so Alistair tucked the blankets close around him and went off to hunt for firewood.
Outside, the fog had lifted at last, and although it was now late in the day, the sun was much brighter than at noon. It even streamed into the hut through the shutters, lighting up swirls of dust motes as he returned, stacking the driest branches he could find into the fireplace and using some of the ancient, withered elfroots for kindling. The fire smoked at first, but fortunately as it heated, the chimney began to draw properly. Alistair blinked sore eyes at the smoke, sighing with relief as it dissipated. He hadn't slept well for over two days and was more than ready to join Loghain in the Fade.
I'll wait until sunset, Alistair told himself. Who knows, maybe he'll be awake by then.
Loghain seemed stable. And there was nothing else to do but wait.
So Alistair peeled off his own armor and gathered the bare necessities, setting them down by the side of the bed: his sword, shield, saddlebags with potions, and water. Then he pulled the hut's lone chair up to the bedside and finally allowed himself to collapse into it, slumping forward, face down in his tired arms which he propped on the side of the narrow bed. In a last-ditch effort to stay vigilant, he listened for a while, but there was no sound beyond the Wilds' familiar chorus of insects, birds and frogs, so he shrugged his shoulders and stopped fighting his heavy eyelids when they closed on their own.
Loghain's first thought was: This is the Calling. Surrounded by the stony darkness under the earth, as surely as if he was already dead and buried, he strode into the well-remembered tunnels and caverns of the Deep Roads. Searching out darkspawn and death was the last option he had left, the only way to bring his lifelong torment to an end.
But so far he was alone, miles underground, walking with no idea of what - if anything - lay ahead. The taint was faint and uncertain at the very edge of his awareness. Everything else was shrouded in a darkness that loomed ever closer as the burned-down embers of the torch in his hand flickered and failed. As the last flame struggled and died, Loghain's will to go on faltered with it. He was so tired. So tempted to simply rest, and wait for the final darkness to fall. Only his old familiar fallback, anger, goaded him to keep trudging onward. No! I'm no snivelling coward, and I'm not just going to lie down and give up! Not after everything. Not now.
Loghain's tainted eyes adjusted with inhuman speed to the darkness, aided by the faint glow of occasional lyrium veins in the cave walls, fine as hairs. The Deep Roads felt and looked just the same as he remembered them from his travels with Maric and Rowan and Katriel: with the same dusty cobwebs filling the ceiling vaults and the same distant clicking of spiders overhead. But the last time he had travelled with his two dearest friends, and now he was walking alone toward his death. Such was the inescapable fate of a Grey Warden. Nothing else was in store for him but a lonely, hopeless fight against the darkspawn, against the poison that ran in his veins.
Loghain couldn't do anything about that fate, but that didn't mean he was about to go down without a struggle. Loghain pulled a flint from his pocket, relit the torch, and then did the same as he did all those years ago: he reached up, holding the torch high overhead. The cobwebs above him caught like the driest of tinder, going up with a great rush of flame, and the spiders burned with them. As before, the air was sucked out of the cavern by the massive blaze overhead. Loghain's thoughts swam as black smoke flooded the cave, inevitable, inescapable: as if the burning ceiling had had collapsed on him, entombing him forever.
Alistair winced and rubbed his face against the blanket; it was damp where he'd drooled on it. The hut's interior was dark; stripes of moonlight spilled past the shutters. Definitely past sunset, dammit! Obviously even the dubious comfort of the creaky chair hadn't stopped him from abandoning his guardian duties for longer than he'd planned.
He squinted at the still silhouette of a man with a dog curled up at his feet. In the glow of the fireplace, Loghain looked as pale as death. Alistair reached for him, feeling the cold, clammy skin, the barely-there pulse. Maker! Please, no!
We've come all this way. He can't die now! Alistair stumbled to his feet and found a candle, held its wick to the coals until it was alight. I have to do something. But what? Frantic, he looked at the shelves, at the dry, blackened, plants hanging from ceiling, at the saddlebags at his feet. The dangling, dusty strings of once-magical herbs were beyond saving, and he'd used their own poultices and injury kits on Loghain already, so Alistair went for the shelves, searching, squinting at the dubiously labeled bottles and sacks, rifling through the stash.
C'mon, Flemeth. You collected all sorts of things. I bet there's something here that could help...
He found yellowed teeth that looked human, and a roll of snakeskin whose scales spelled out arcane runes. He searched through oily, dusty, broken glass, checking every last shelf for anything that looked even vaguely useful.
At last, Alistair's fingers closed on a bottle that looked promising: as in, its contents didn't look or smell like any poison Alistair knew. They didn't smell like much of anything, at least not to Alistair's nose. The dusty label was hard to read in the gloom, but when Alistair held the candle as close as he dared, he thought the crabbed, faint script spelled out: 'Enlightenment for the Lost'.
Lost. Alistair looked from the bottle in his hand to the pale, still body on the bed. Suddenly he was struck by how much Loghain looked like a mage trapped in the Fade... the very mages Alistair had been trained to watch over, and to 'pacify' if they failed to wake from their Harrowing, or if they gave in to the temptation of exploring the spirit realm.
Alistair took one step toward the bed, then stopped dead mid-stride, caught into an agony of indecision.
What if I'm wrong? Would Flemeth write any label that wasn't a deliberate lie? What if I give it to him, and he... dies? I'd be his killer after all!
He gave a bitter, hurt bark of laughter.
Just like I prayed to be, not so long ago. It'd serve me right.
With the deliberation of a soldier stepping in front of an enemy's blade, Alistair uncorked the bottle, brought it to his lips and took a single, cautious sip. He tasted spirits, and herbs, magic and a faint tang of the lyrium that kept templars in servitude to the Chantry for their entire lives: the same fate that Alistair had barely managed to avoid.
Ugh. I'll count to a hundred, Alistair told himself firmly. If it doesn't make me sick - or kill me - then it probably won't do the same to him.
Loghain hadn't expected to wake, so all he felt was surprise as he blinked blearily at the glow of a campfire that held back the Deep Roads' shadows. When he looked away from that light and saw Maric and Rowan standing beside him, the surprise left him instantly, crowded out by the sweetly painful tangle of emotion that hit him: at seeing the two great lost loves of his life, missed and mourned for decades; and at the sudden certainty that his own life was now over.
The realisation that he was dead seemed a distant thing, unimportant beside seeing Rowan and Maric once more. Loghain was dazed with wonder; he couldn't tear his gaze from them. They were so beautiful, shining in the gloom of that cave. Both were once again in the prime of life, yet there was a wisdom in their bearing, a knowing reminiscence in their expression, that told of the lifetime each of them had lived. Maric was a golden, vital presence, free of the careworn, haggard air of kingship, the creeping spiderweb of silver in his hair. Rowan was heartbreakingly lovely, once more the vivid warrior she was in her youth, not the fragile, feeble shadow the wasting disease had made of her toward the end.
Such lonely, aching years Loghain had endured, once they'd left him behind. Loghain had marched at the head of an army, had taken a wife and sired and raised a daughter fit for the throne, had dealt with the political wranglings of the nobles (Maker damn those self-serving pigs). But he'd fulfilled his roles in life - as General, as husband and father and Regent - solely for the good of Ferelden, not for power or prestige, not even for love. He'd had nothing in common with pretty, delicate Celia, had been all too relieved to leave her behind in Gwaren while he dealt with the bearpit that was the Denerim Court. Of course love had been out of the question for him once Rowan and Maric had died, but Loghain had even denied himself the most basic companionship, the trust of comrades in arms: had held perfectly worthy warriors like Cauthrien at arms' length, had taken refuge from her unspoken offer of friendship - and perhaps more - behind the formalities of command.
It had been a lonely life, of course it had; but it had felt necessary to him. He'd already been luckier than he'd ever deserved: in his youth he'd had not one but two companions by his side, in his heart, and even after he'd lost them both, he'd needed no other. Mourning their loss, remembering their love, had been enough for him.
But now, they were with him once more, and none of those lonely years mattered anymore. Loghain ached with a joy fiercer than grief, as he rose to his feet and stood before them. With his eyes prickling with unshed tears, with a throat too tight for speech, he simply lifted his arms and reached out to them both, decades of mute yearning in every stretch of muscle, in every line of his face.
He wasn't sure if they'd reach for him in return, or if either or both of them would reproach him instead: for Cailan (even though he'd had no other choice) or for another of the many decisions he'd regretted making, in the long years he'd endured without them. But what could be worse than what they'd already been through together, what Loghain had been through alone? Now, even their old shouting matches would be infinitely better than never seeing them again.
"Rowan," Loghain rasped hoarsely: his throat was so tight it hurt to speak, but even that ache was wonderful. "Maric. You waited for me." I love you.
But he needn't have worried: they closed the distance at once. Maric prowled toward him with his buoyant, vigorous stride, while Rowan simply hurled herself at him, colliding with his side and clutching his waist in a tight grip. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and another around Maric's waist, even as Maric's arms slid around his shoulders in turn. Rowan's fragrant curls tickled his nose, and he bowed his head and sank into a kiss as velvety as rose petals, as warm as summer. Then he turned his head, and just that easily, just that naturally, he was caught up into the storm of sensation that was Maric's kiss, the silk of Maric's hair in his fingers, the strength of Maric's embrace: joys he'd never known in life.
The kiss broke and all three of them leaned in, sharing a sigh of utter relief. Maric shook his head. "Loghain, you haven't changed a bit." At Loghain's startled look, Maric gave a quick flash of a grin, "You're still the stubbornest sod I know. You really shouldn't be here."
Loghain heard the words with a painful shock, feeling himself stiffen in their shared embrace. Not meant to be with them, he means, Loghain thought, Oh Maric, no!
"Not like that!" Rowan replied as immediately as if he'd spoken his anguish aloud. Her hands leapt to his shoulders and she gave him a short, sharp shake, just like she used to do. Her hair flew about her face as she shook her head vehemently. "You've already spent too long like this," she gestured at the gloom that surrounded them, "Shut away from life, alone in the dark with your grief."
"We always knew you'd miss us," Maric gave him one of his dazzling, roguish grins, and Loghain's heart clenched at the sight. "So you didn't have anything to prove." Maric's arms tightened companionably, giving him a reassuring squeeze.
"You shouldn't have denied yourself, love." Rowan leaned her head on his shoulder; he felt her slow, deep sigh moving her against his side. "You've already missed out on so much."
"What did I tell you about stopping to smell the roses?" Maric nudged him, and Loghain snorted his own amusement at the memory.
Their embrace eased, their arms sliding around his body without lifting away as they moved, so that they were both standing before him, arms still loosely wrapped around him and each other. Their expressions sobered, but the gleam of affection was still so clear in their faces, in the lingering drape of their arms, the caress of their hands.
Rowan reached up, cupping his cheek in her palm, so much warmth in eyes as green as springtime. "I love you," she breathed, leaning in against his chest, craning upward so that her every word brushed her lips against his in the sweetest of caresses. "And you'd better believe that, you cynical git, because if you doubt me for a second, the moment you're dead I'm going to kick your arse all over the Fade." She gave him one of her fierce smiles, and he reared back to huff one of his dry laughs, before leaning in to rest his forehead against hers. "So stop martyring yourself." Rowan murmured. "Stop denying the fact that you're still a man with a lot of life left in you."
She gave him a sly smile, spiced with a challenging arch of an eyebrow, before she took a step back, her arms slipping unhurriedly away from his body, and Maric moved to stand before him, his arms wrapping firmly around Loghain's waist, holding him close, so that they could speak eye to eye.
"I love you," Maric murmured, so much joy in that summer sky gaze. "I've loved you ever since I stumbled out of the trees and practically fell into your lap. Ever since the first time you saved my life." Sure, strong hands slid up Loghain's shoulders, up the sides of his throat, fingers spearing into his hair, cupping his head, holding it still, so that he couldn't look away. "I will never stop loving you. I know you well enough to know you'll never stop loving me. And I'll be there to remind you of those facts, you stubborn, self-doubting sod, when fate finally catches up with you. So you don't have to worry anymore, about mourning me, or missing me, or proving any damn thing to me." The hands cupping his head gave it the slightest shake. "So stop hiding. Stop living in the past, because you've still got a future."
Then Maric slowly eased out of their embrace, until he was standing beside Rowan once more. Their forms blurred into light, imprecise through the tears that suddenly filled Loghain's eyes, at the realisation that this blessed reunion was coming to an end.
"Life's too short," murmured Rowan, her soft voice sounding as close as if they were still in each other's arms.
"So live it!" Maric breathed passionately into Loghain's ear.
Then their forms were too bright to look at through the tears that spilled hot as lifeblood down his face.
And Loghain was alone once more. Alone in the dark.
The metallic, mineral taste of lyrium still lingered on Alistair's tongue by the time he'd finished counting to a hundred, but other than that, he couldn't sense any other effects of the potion. Not poison then, at least not immediate.
Loghain's pale profile looked like a bone carving, his nose and chin casting deep shadows in the flickering candlelight. For a second, Alistair looked at him and couldn't tell if he was breathing at all. Alistair's heart jumped as he searched the taint for Loghain's warmth. It took all of Alistair's mental focus to find that faint, fading spark. He's dying! He'll be dead soon no matter what I do.
I have to do something! What do I - what do we - have to lose?
And with a final, desperate leap of faith, Alistair uncorked the dubious bottle once more and tipped it over Loghain's lips, pouring the clear liquid past his clenched teeth, making sure it didn't spill down Loghain's jaw and onto the pillow. With bated breath Alistair searched Loghain's face for any signs of a reaction to a potential poison. But there was nothing. The pallor of his face didn't change at all, and neither did the slow pace of his faint, shallow breaths. Alistair waited by the bedside, focusing on all the small signs that Loghain was still a sleeping man, not a dead body.
Come on, work! Alistair thought, he pleaded... but for once he couldn't pray. He remembered all too well how cautiously Morrigan had guarded her poisonous concoctions, keeping her work, especially the kind with any magical ingredients or properties, far away from his sparring and training spots, protecting them with rune-covered leathers and safe distance. If I chant, it just might strip any magic from the potion. So I can't! That potion just has to work!
After what felt like an eternity, Alistair decided that Loghain's breathing did seem deeper than before. Was it a trick of the light, or was a hint of colour returning to his face as well? Alistair watched and listened with desperate intensity, but he still couldn't tell for certain.
The candle in his hand flickered, almost used up.
As far as nurses go, he thought bitterly, any Chantry sister, or even your average barmaid, experienced with drunks, would do better than me.
And so, Alistair did all he could do: he kept on staring at Loghain, and waited for any sign of an improvement.
When Solona was injured he'd let himself be chased out of this very room by Flemeth, by Morrigan. But now, charging brontos couldn't drag him away. The ghost of Flemeth herself could storm down the fireplace, and set the entire hut ablaze with her dragon breath, and it wouldn't matter. Alistair was staying right here by Loghain's side, and watching him for any change.
For better or for worse.
Loghain was alone. Maric and Rowan leaving him should have plunged him into despair, but the memory of their reassurances glowed within him: that they loved him, that he didn't need to hold himself apart from life to mourn them. Their memory held the fierce, fresh ache of loss at bay.
Then Loghain's solitude was broken by a distant call. It wasn't anything as simple as a voice. It was a faint sense of familiar presence in the taint: a gentle heat, the distant radiance of another Warden's life force. No, not just any Warden: Loghain felt a soul-deep certainty that he'd know this sunlit warmth anywhere. Alistair! Loghain's heart leapt with a sharp pang of hope. Alistair's alive! And close.
He closed his eyes and cast his senses out into the taint, searching. His head lifted and he turned, focusing on that radiated call - worlds apart from the death sentence of the Calling - facing it with the same blind, instinctive certainty that turns plants to face the sun.
There. That was where Loghain longed to be. Out of the cold and darkness of his tomb, away from the grief and solitude of his loss. In the living world. In the sunlight. With Alistair.
That inner glow was a beacon by which Loghain navigated the maze of the Deep Roads. Its warmth eased the soreness in his body as he scaled one punishing upward incline after another.
The journey was a struggle every bit as nightmarish as trying to escape from the Black City itself. There were caves whose floors fell away without warning into treacherous pits. There were rockslides littered with sharp bones of deep stalkers, tunnels whose walls were no longer firm stone well-lit by veins of lyrium; now they were lightless, slimy mud. But Loghain ignored all of these barriers. His attention was fixed as surely as a compass needle on his goal.
That distant sense of warmth guided Loghain without hesitation through a labyrinth that would otherwise have left him lost and stumbling to his death in the dark. He trudged to the peak of one more interminable climb, and rounded a bend to see the finish of all his struggles: a dead end, the tunnel caved in, nothing but a featureless slope of dirt from floor to ceiling. It should have been an utterly devastating sight. But instead he hearkened to the growing sense of life and light now just beyond his reach, and dug into the fallen earth with his bare hands, throwing aside rocks and soil, forcing his arms deep, then his shoulders, striving against the earth with his whole body, feeling it loosen and shift before him, until at last his hands pushed through and broke the surface. He hurled himself into the gap, struggling upward, flinging aside clumps of earth as he exploded into the light of the living world. He drew a deep lungful of the free air and released it in a great shout of triumph, as he hauled himself from the pit in the earth and collapsed on his back on green, untainted grass, gazing up at the endless, glorious sky.
He knew this place. Alistair's Clearing. Loghain remembered smiling to himself as he wrote that name on his newest map. Buoyed by that memory, by the triumph of his escape, by the warmth that now felt close enough to breathe its benediction like sunlight on his skin, he homed in on that gentle beacon, like a wanderer lost in the Wilds heading for the warm golden glow of a campfire.
In the waking world, Loghain opened his eyes.
I'm alive.
He turned his head, and observed a familiar form, slumped and snoring close by.
And so is Alistair. Alive and well.
Loghain smiled.
A hand came to rest on Alistair's head, and he woke with a blink. That dream of his youth among the templars still clung to his mind, and he thought for an instant that the Revered Mother had caught him sleeping, face down in a book he was supposed to have been studying. He sighed and buried his face in cloth softer than an ordinary dusty tome's pages, trying to avoid her punishment for laziness for just one more second.
"Get up here," croaked a voice hoarse from disuse. "No point in getting a cricked neck."
What? Alistair opened one bleary eye and peered up. ... Loghain? He jolted up, wide eyes taking in the sight of Loghain moving, looking back, talking! Alive! "You! You're... You!"
Loghain arched an eyebrow and snorted at Alistair's flustered surprise, mouth quirking in an almost-grin.
"Um. Course you are," Alistair muttered in a shamefaced aside. He's not dying! Oh, thank the Maker! It worked! Alistair reached out instinctively and stopped himself the last second, his hands fidgeting with the corner of the pillow in nervous excitement, "How do you feel? Are you OK? Do you want a... - anything?"
Eyes as pale as moonlight - uncannily bright in those dark sockets, under those black brows and lashes - glinted in mute amusement. "Peace and quiet," Loghain grumbled dryly, but he still hitched himself over to make space on the bed. The caution in his initial movements faded quickly; apparently his ribs had healed enough not to hurt. "Up here, I said," a hand closed on Alistair's arm and tugged. "You look as tired as I am. Get some rest." The words were harsh, but a smile lingered in that heavylidded gaze, in the curl of a mouth still soft with sleep.
"Huh," Alistair said. "You wanna... oh." He stumbled up from the creaky chair and sat on the edge of the squeaky old bed that looked and sounded about as stable as the rest of the hut. He stretched out cautiously, doing his best to take up the smallest possible amount of space. His stare met Loghain's. His cheek met pillow. "Uh-huh."
The arm that yanked Alistair further away from the edge of the bed was peremptory, even possessive as it settled to rest draped casually over his waist. Loghain exhaled a that's-more-like-it "Hmph," and those pale eyes drifted closed.
Alistair's life - the life of a bastard, practically an orphan, and then of a chaste Chantry man - lacked situations where one would be held while falling asleep. Growing up he was taught that beds and bedrolls were to remain solitary and free of guests, in order to avoid an uncomfortable morning of scrutiny and shame, and even more uncomfortable talks with the Chantry's elders. But as a boy Alistair had slept with the hounds, and even as a man, he was familiar with the comfort of running his fingers though Dog's bristly fur and hiding his nose in the mabari's broad back. Still, deprived of the human equivalent of such interaction, he didn't quite know how to take this, nor what was expected of him if he was to play the role usually set aside for a mabari, at least in Alistair's way of the world. It was all so... odd. Loghain seemed far more likely to hold a dagger in his sleep than his hound, and yet now his arm was slung around Alistair as casually as if Alistair was a mabari pup or a pillow.
Maybe it's the potion, he decided. He does seem a bit dazed, still. But it's so good to see him awake!
The weight on the bed shifted as the mabari lifted his heavy head, turned up one floppy ear, then sighed and jumped off the bed, making space for the changing of the guard. The hound padded over to the barricaded door, turned three times and settled down again on the floor.
Alistair trusted Dog to guard them both. He burrowed his face into the dusty pillow, stretched on the mattress, thin and lumpy and impossibly comfortable to his weary body, and sighed, and slept.
Cold. Loghain had been cold and alone in the dark - he'd been lost in the Deep Roads and drowned in the foulness of a necromancer's curse and a dead ogre's memories - for so long that even the eternal strategist in him didn't pause for thought. He simply turned to the red-gold glow in his mind: the sun of the living world, a halo of light in cropped coppery hair, a gilding of firelight on muscled limbs. He reached for the warmth, the weight and pulse and scent of life, gathered it to his chest, twined his limbs with it and held it close. Buried his nose in the tickle of hair, the sleekness of skin, and breathed.
The darkness and the calls of owls told Loghain that night had fallen hours ago. The breeze coming through the open window smelled of stale water and wet leaves turned to mulch, which told Loghain he was in the swampy lowlands of the Wilds. A candle stump beside the bed, although unlit, still trailed a faint thread of smoke, which told Loghain that Alistair had been doing something that needed light, not long before.
Moonlight shone through the shutters and spilled over the bed and over Alistair's still form. The undisturbed chirping of insects and chorus of frogs, and the quiet in the taint, all told Loghain that the coast was clear. But it was the glow of Alistair's warmth - in the taint and in the flesh, lying relaxed and calm by his side, under the drape of his outstretched arm - that soothed Loghain. To be so close to someone he trusted was a rare treat: it allowed Loghain to truly relax, in a way that was usually impossible for him. He thought back to the last time he'd felt this effortless, natural ease, and realised without surprise that it'd been when he'd slept next to Maric or Rowan during their travels: fellow soldiers who he trusted with his life, and who he knew had the skills to defend his life.
The bone-deep, soul-deep comfort he felt now was nothing like the cloying feather-mattress luxury of his marital bed back in Gwaren: when he'd always been the one to do all the protecting, when he'd never for an instant been able to set aside the burdens of being a husband and a father and a Teyrn. Funny how the titles and roles he'd actually had some skill in, he'd always filled in Denerim: as Ferelden's General, and as the King and Queen's most trusted advisor. Small wonder that his rare visits back to Gwaren had weighed down his soul, like the Chevalier plate had weighed down his body after the leathers he'd worn in the Rebellion.
Now he wore no armor at all. Now there was only the lighter weight of blankets and the soft cocoon of linens around him, and the comforting warmth of a trusted body in his arms.
Lulled by the slow rise and fall of Alistair's breathing, Loghain drifted off into a healing sleep.
No Deep Roads.
No darkspawn.
Just peace.
Summary: Alistair's adventure in applied alchemy.
Alternative links: AO3 ffn
Chapter 1: The Spirit Charm
Chapter 2: The Ruins of Lothering
Chapter 3: The Canticle of Shartan
Chapter 4: The Map Case
Chapter 5: Of Cheese and Chasind
Chapter 6: The Fade
Chapter 7: Names
Chapter 8: Flames
Chapter 9: Two Swords
Chapter 10: Pyrrhic Victory
Two Roads
Chapter 11: Life and Death... And What Comes After
Right, Alistair thought. I'm in charge. I have to stay in control. Everything's up to me now.He took a deep breath. He knew better than to feel sure that this sort of stern mental talk would be enough to dissolve his unease. Still, I suppose it's worth a try, he told himself.
Turned out, it wasn't enough, not by a long shot. Alistair exhaled, and there it was still: that heartstopping, mindchilling pressure of holding a helpless man's life in his hands. What if I make a mistake? Maker! Mistakes happen all the time, when you least expect them. But if I do something wrong now, then Loghain will be the one who pays the price.
He shook his head. Enough! No time to think about that now. We've got to get out of here!
It helped just a bit to focus outwards, on the fact that Dog was ahead of them, leading, that Loghain's horse made its way downhill without so much as a nudge from Alistair.
The lowlands were shrouded in fog, thick enough to limit visibility in a worrying way. It was a marked change after the pitiless snow-covered glare of Ostagar. The path passed through spindly stands of conifers, forcing Alistair to duck low-hanging prickly branches that loomed suddenly out of the mist to shower him with dew and cobwebs. He winced and clawed sticky strands off his face. More cobwebs dangled from wet branches, grey as the mist, beaded with foggy droplets and thin enough to stretch and tear at a touch: nothing like the deadly snares spun by giant spiders. Alistair remembered all too well how Loghain once spoke to him of spidersilk, his voice lulling Alistair into an awed near-trance with its danger and possibility. But these webs were only ever spun to trap bugs, not humans.
Aside from a few brief glimpses of thankfully un-Blighted wolves, all was quiet. Alistair's constant, worried search of the taint yielded no sense of danger, nothing apart from the faintest possible glimmer from the man slumped against his chest, lolling slightly to and fro in the circle of his arms. Not that Alistair was much steadier in the saddle than Loghain: he fought his own exhaustion until the slow, cautious pace of the horse picking its way between patches of swamp finally lulled him into a daze, nodding on the brink of sleep.
Maybe we should head for the highway. It's where people would be, he thought blearily. But it seemed even the horse and Dog supported his earlier choice. The mabari trotted along narrow paths left untrodden for seasons, heading onward, ever deeper into seemingly unexplored wilderness. But Alistair had been here before: he remembered the hidden paths Morrigan had taken when she'd led Solona and him through these wilds to her mother's hut.
That hut was the closest shelter Alistair knew.
Where is it? Alistair peered blearily through the swirling fog. We should've reached it by now. His mind was sluggish with exhaustion, just as his arms were weighed down by a comatose man.
Ah-ha! At last, from under heavy eyelids, Alistair glimpsed a small patch of ruins, and a crooked hut which leaned against a half-destroyed stone wall, its shape slumped as if it was as weary as he was. The shack looked and sounded rickety enough to tumble down in the next storm, if it wasn't for the wall propping it up on one side and tall trees crowding around it, all of them shielding the shack from the worst of the weather. Or perhaps the hut was held up by magic: there must've been plenty of magic here, plenty of ritual blood and lyrium spilt over this patch of land. For all of Flemeth's wickedness, Alistair had never sensed the faintest hint of darkspawn taint here: not in the land, not in its inhabitants. Apparently she had protected her home every bit as warily as Morrigan had warded her tent, and that protection had lingered even after the old witch's death.
"Hello?" Alistair called out half-heartedly, just to see if anyone else had moved into the abandoned house. Dog barked once, sniffed at the hut, and turned back to Alistair, not paying much more attention to the structure, nor the squeaky door hanging partially off the hinges and swaying in the wind, never quite closing shut.
Alistair hoped that despite the general air of disrepair, the hut would still be sound enough to shelter them from the storms that happened all too often in the Wilds. With luck, it wouldn't be much worse than a barn, and Alistair had learned every trick to making barns livable when he was a boy.
First things first. He dismounted by the entrance to the hut and caught Loghain as he slumped off the horse's neck. Alistair sank to his knees under Loghain's weight, settling him outstretched on the ground.
Alistair sat there for a moment, panting, gathering his strength, before standing and approaching the hut as warily as if it were a sleeping dragon. He reached out toward the hut with all of his templar-trained abilities, in case Flemeth had returned from the Fade to haunt the place. Apart from a few creaks from the hut's aged wood as it swayed slightly in the wind, there was no reaction.
Huh. Nothing. First lucky break I've had in ages, Alistair thought, as he turned away from the hut toward the man lying pale and still on the ground. C'mon, then, Sleeping Beauty, he thought with an inward smirk as he bent to grasp Loghain under the arms, let's get you inside.
He staggered into the hut, dragging Loghain with him, then heaving him up onto the hut's solitary bed. As Alistair's breathing returned to normal after the exertion, he stretched to work the kinks out of his back, and looked around himself.
Apart from the bed, the hut contained only a few chests - all of which they'd opened and emptied after dragon Flemeth's demise - and some shelves of suspicious ingredients and unidentifiable potions. Grimoires weighted down a makeshift table of boards resting on small barrels. Skulls - maybe darkspawn, maybe human - were covered with waxy drips from burned-down candles. Animal skins covered the walls and floor, instead of tapestries and rugs. Herbs and bulbs and roots hung from the low ceiling all around. Some of the roots looked like dried-out human hands, some of the bulbs seemed half-eaten, but there was a perfectly ordinary braid of garlic among them, as well as strings of deep mushrooms, elfroot and deathroot. Alistair would've been heartened to see them, but they were all shrivelled and gray with dust, far too old to be useful. A cobwebbed cauldron hung over the long-cold fireplace. Alistair came closer to peer into it, and wrinkled his nose. Whatever the contents had once been, now they were just a rancid black scum. He hastily carried the cauldron outside and dumped it well away from the hut.
The horse looked exhausted as he walked over to remove the saddlebags and unsaddle it. He scratched its forelock and mentally promised it a good currycomb once he'd caught up on some of his own sleep. For now, he just tethered it to a tree, in a grassy spot by the edge of the nearest pool.
The mabari followed Alistair inside, leaving wet muddy pawprints alongside Alistair's muddy boot prints and the drag marks from Loghain's heels. The dog shook the worst of the soil from his thick fur and hopped up onto the foot of Loghain's bed, settling there like a silent, hairy guardian as Alistair barricaded the door.
He looked down at Loghain. The man was shivering and a faint frown creased his brows. Alistair tugged the blanket over him, then bent without much hope to peer under the bed. But then he gave a "Ha!" of surprised triumph and dragged out a second blanket, coughing at the resulting cloud of dust as he spread that blanket over Loghain as well. He rummaged through their saddlebags then held a water skin to Loghain's mouth, trying to get him to drink. Loghain's skin felt clammy and cold, so Alistair tucked the blankets close around him and went off to hunt for firewood.
Outside, the fog had lifted at last, and although it was now late in the day, the sun was much brighter than at noon. It even streamed into the hut through the shutters, lighting up swirls of dust motes as he returned, stacking the driest branches he could find into the fireplace and using some of the ancient, withered elfroots for kindling. The fire smoked at first, but fortunately as it heated, the chimney began to draw properly. Alistair blinked sore eyes at the smoke, sighing with relief as it dissipated. He hadn't slept well for over two days and was more than ready to join Loghain in the Fade.
I'll wait until sunset, Alistair told himself. Who knows, maybe he'll be awake by then.
Loghain seemed stable. And there was nothing else to do but wait.
So Alistair peeled off his own armor and gathered the bare necessities, setting them down by the side of the bed: his sword, shield, saddlebags with potions, and water. Then he pulled the hut's lone chair up to the bedside and finally allowed himself to collapse into it, slumping forward, face down in his tired arms which he propped on the side of the narrow bed. In a last-ditch effort to stay vigilant, he listened for a while, but there was no sound beyond the Wilds' familiar chorus of insects, birds and frogs, so he shrugged his shoulders and stopped fighting his heavy eyelids when they closed on their own.
Loghain's first thought was: This is the Calling. Surrounded by the stony darkness under the earth, as surely as if he was already dead and buried, he strode into the well-remembered tunnels and caverns of the Deep Roads. Searching out darkspawn and death was the last option he had left, the only way to bring his lifelong torment to an end.
But so far he was alone, miles underground, walking with no idea of what - if anything - lay ahead. The taint was faint and uncertain at the very edge of his awareness. Everything else was shrouded in a darkness that loomed ever closer as the burned-down embers of the torch in his hand flickered and failed. As the last flame struggled and died, Loghain's will to go on faltered with it. He was so tired. So tempted to simply rest, and wait for the final darkness to fall. Only his old familiar fallback, anger, goaded him to keep trudging onward. No! I'm no snivelling coward, and I'm not just going to lie down and give up! Not after everything. Not now.
Loghain's tainted eyes adjusted with inhuman speed to the darkness, aided by the faint glow of occasional lyrium veins in the cave walls, fine as hairs. The Deep Roads felt and looked just the same as he remembered them from his travels with Maric and Rowan and Katriel: with the same dusty cobwebs filling the ceiling vaults and the same distant clicking of spiders overhead. But the last time he had travelled with his two dearest friends, and now he was walking alone toward his death. Such was the inescapable fate of a Grey Warden. Nothing else was in store for him but a lonely, hopeless fight against the darkspawn, against the poison that ran in his veins.
Loghain couldn't do anything about that fate, but that didn't mean he was about to go down without a struggle. Loghain pulled a flint from his pocket, relit the torch, and then did the same as he did all those years ago: he reached up, holding the torch high overhead. The cobwebs above him caught like the driest of tinder, going up with a great rush of flame, and the spiders burned with them. As before, the air was sucked out of the cavern by the massive blaze overhead. Loghain's thoughts swam as black smoke flooded the cave, inevitable, inescapable: as if the burning ceiling had had collapsed on him, entombing him forever.
Alistair winced and rubbed his face against the blanket; it was damp where he'd drooled on it. The hut's interior was dark; stripes of moonlight spilled past the shutters. Definitely past sunset, dammit! Obviously even the dubious comfort of the creaky chair hadn't stopped him from abandoning his guardian duties for longer than he'd planned.
He squinted at the still silhouette of a man with a dog curled up at his feet. In the glow of the fireplace, Loghain looked as pale as death. Alistair reached for him, feeling the cold, clammy skin, the barely-there pulse. Maker! Please, no!
We've come all this way. He can't die now! Alistair stumbled to his feet and found a candle, held its wick to the coals until it was alight. I have to do something. But what? Frantic, he looked at the shelves, at the dry, blackened, plants hanging from ceiling, at the saddlebags at his feet. The dangling, dusty strings of once-magical herbs were beyond saving, and he'd used their own poultices and injury kits on Loghain already, so Alistair went for the shelves, searching, squinting at the dubiously labeled bottles and sacks, rifling through the stash.
C'mon, Flemeth. You collected all sorts of things. I bet there's something here that could help...
He found yellowed teeth that looked human, and a roll of snakeskin whose scales spelled out arcane runes. He searched through oily, dusty, broken glass, checking every last shelf for anything that looked even vaguely useful.
At last, Alistair's fingers closed on a bottle that looked promising: as in, its contents didn't look or smell like any poison Alistair knew. They didn't smell like much of anything, at least not to Alistair's nose. The dusty label was hard to read in the gloom, but when Alistair held the candle as close as he dared, he thought the crabbed, faint script spelled out: 'Enlightenment for the Lost'.
Lost. Alistair looked from the bottle in his hand to the pale, still body on the bed. Suddenly he was struck by how much Loghain looked like a mage trapped in the Fade... the very mages Alistair had been trained to watch over, and to 'pacify' if they failed to wake from their Harrowing, or if they gave in to the temptation of exploring the spirit realm.
Alistair took one step toward the bed, then stopped dead mid-stride, caught into an agony of indecision.
What if I'm wrong? Would Flemeth write any label that wasn't a deliberate lie? What if I give it to him, and he... dies? I'd be his killer after all!
He gave a bitter, hurt bark of laughter.
Just like I prayed to be, not so long ago. It'd serve me right.
With the deliberation of a soldier stepping in front of an enemy's blade, Alistair uncorked the bottle, brought it to his lips and took a single, cautious sip. He tasted spirits, and herbs, magic and a faint tang of the lyrium that kept templars in servitude to the Chantry for their entire lives: the same fate that Alistair had barely managed to avoid.
Ugh. I'll count to a hundred, Alistair told himself firmly. If it doesn't make me sick - or kill me - then it probably won't do the same to him.
Loghain hadn't expected to wake, so all he felt was surprise as he blinked blearily at the glow of a campfire that held back the Deep Roads' shadows. When he looked away from that light and saw Maric and Rowan standing beside him, the surprise left him instantly, crowded out by the sweetly painful tangle of emotion that hit him: at seeing the two great lost loves of his life, missed and mourned for decades; and at the sudden certainty that his own life was now over.
The realisation that he was dead seemed a distant thing, unimportant beside seeing Rowan and Maric once more. Loghain was dazed with wonder; he couldn't tear his gaze from them. They were so beautiful, shining in the gloom of that cave. Both were once again in the prime of life, yet there was a wisdom in their bearing, a knowing reminiscence in their expression, that told of the lifetime each of them had lived. Maric was a golden, vital presence, free of the careworn, haggard air of kingship, the creeping spiderweb of silver in his hair. Rowan was heartbreakingly lovely, once more the vivid warrior she was in her youth, not the fragile, feeble shadow the wasting disease had made of her toward the end.
Such lonely, aching years Loghain had endured, once they'd left him behind. Loghain had marched at the head of an army, had taken a wife and sired and raised a daughter fit for the throne, had dealt with the political wranglings of the nobles (Maker damn those self-serving pigs). But he'd fulfilled his roles in life - as General, as husband and father and Regent - solely for the good of Ferelden, not for power or prestige, not even for love. He'd had nothing in common with pretty, delicate Celia, had been all too relieved to leave her behind in Gwaren while he dealt with the bearpit that was the Denerim Court. Of course love had been out of the question for him once Rowan and Maric had died, but Loghain had even denied himself the most basic companionship, the trust of comrades in arms: had held perfectly worthy warriors like Cauthrien at arms' length, had taken refuge from her unspoken offer of friendship - and perhaps more - behind the formalities of command.
It had been a lonely life, of course it had; but it had felt necessary to him. He'd already been luckier than he'd ever deserved: in his youth he'd had not one but two companions by his side, in his heart, and even after he'd lost them both, he'd needed no other. Mourning their loss, remembering their love, had been enough for him.
But now, they were with him once more, and none of those lonely years mattered anymore. Loghain ached with a joy fiercer than grief, as he rose to his feet and stood before them. With his eyes prickling with unshed tears, with a throat too tight for speech, he simply lifted his arms and reached out to them both, decades of mute yearning in every stretch of muscle, in every line of his face.
He wasn't sure if they'd reach for him in return, or if either or both of them would reproach him instead: for Cailan (even though he'd had no other choice) or for another of the many decisions he'd regretted making, in the long years he'd endured without them. But what could be worse than what they'd already been through together, what Loghain had been through alone? Now, even their old shouting matches would be infinitely better than never seeing them again.
"Rowan," Loghain rasped hoarsely: his throat was so tight it hurt to speak, but even that ache was wonderful. "Maric. You waited for me." I love you.
But he needn't have worried: they closed the distance at once. Maric prowled toward him with his buoyant, vigorous stride, while Rowan simply hurled herself at him, colliding with his side and clutching his waist in a tight grip. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and another around Maric's waist, even as Maric's arms slid around his shoulders in turn. Rowan's fragrant curls tickled his nose, and he bowed his head and sank into a kiss as velvety as rose petals, as warm as summer. Then he turned his head, and just that easily, just that naturally, he was caught up into the storm of sensation that was Maric's kiss, the silk of Maric's hair in his fingers, the strength of Maric's embrace: joys he'd never known in life.
The kiss broke and all three of them leaned in, sharing a sigh of utter relief. Maric shook his head. "Loghain, you haven't changed a bit." At Loghain's startled look, Maric gave a quick flash of a grin, "You're still the stubbornest sod I know. You really shouldn't be here."
Loghain heard the words with a painful shock, feeling himself stiffen in their shared embrace. Not meant to be with them, he means, Loghain thought, Oh Maric, no!
"Not like that!" Rowan replied as immediately as if he'd spoken his anguish aloud. Her hands leapt to his shoulders and she gave him a short, sharp shake, just like she used to do. Her hair flew about her face as she shook her head vehemently. "You've already spent too long like this," she gestured at the gloom that surrounded them, "Shut away from life, alone in the dark with your grief."
"We always knew you'd miss us," Maric gave him one of his dazzling, roguish grins, and Loghain's heart clenched at the sight. "So you didn't have anything to prove." Maric's arms tightened companionably, giving him a reassuring squeeze.
"You shouldn't have denied yourself, love." Rowan leaned her head on his shoulder; he felt her slow, deep sigh moving her against his side. "You've already missed out on so much."
"What did I tell you about stopping to smell the roses?" Maric nudged him, and Loghain snorted his own amusement at the memory.
Their embrace eased, their arms sliding around his body without lifting away as they moved, so that they were both standing before him, arms still loosely wrapped around him and each other. Their expressions sobered, but the gleam of affection was still so clear in their faces, in the lingering drape of their arms, the caress of their hands.
Rowan reached up, cupping his cheek in her palm, so much warmth in eyes as green as springtime. "I love you," she breathed, leaning in against his chest, craning upward so that her every word brushed her lips against his in the sweetest of caresses. "And you'd better believe that, you cynical git, because if you doubt me for a second, the moment you're dead I'm going to kick your arse all over the Fade." She gave him one of her fierce smiles, and he reared back to huff one of his dry laughs, before leaning in to rest his forehead against hers. "So stop martyring yourself." Rowan murmured. "Stop denying the fact that you're still a man with a lot of life left in you."
She gave him a sly smile, spiced with a challenging arch of an eyebrow, before she took a step back, her arms slipping unhurriedly away from his body, and Maric moved to stand before him, his arms wrapping firmly around Loghain's waist, holding him close, so that they could speak eye to eye.
"I love you," Maric murmured, so much joy in that summer sky gaze. "I've loved you ever since I stumbled out of the trees and practically fell into your lap. Ever since the first time you saved my life." Sure, strong hands slid up Loghain's shoulders, up the sides of his throat, fingers spearing into his hair, cupping his head, holding it still, so that he couldn't look away. "I will never stop loving you. I know you well enough to know you'll never stop loving me. And I'll be there to remind you of those facts, you stubborn, self-doubting sod, when fate finally catches up with you. So you don't have to worry anymore, about mourning me, or missing me, or proving any damn thing to me." The hands cupping his head gave it the slightest shake. "So stop hiding. Stop living in the past, because you've still got a future."
Then Maric slowly eased out of their embrace, until he was standing beside Rowan once more. Their forms blurred into light, imprecise through the tears that suddenly filled Loghain's eyes, at the realisation that this blessed reunion was coming to an end.
"Life's too short," murmured Rowan, her soft voice sounding as close as if they were still in each other's arms.
"So live it!" Maric breathed passionately into Loghain's ear.
Then their forms were too bright to look at through the tears that spilled hot as lifeblood down his face.
And Loghain was alone once more. Alone in the dark.
The metallic, mineral taste of lyrium still lingered on Alistair's tongue by the time he'd finished counting to a hundred, but other than that, he couldn't sense any other effects of the potion. Not poison then, at least not immediate.
Loghain's pale profile looked like a bone carving, his nose and chin casting deep shadows in the flickering candlelight. For a second, Alistair looked at him and couldn't tell if he was breathing at all. Alistair's heart jumped as he searched the taint for Loghain's warmth. It took all of Alistair's mental focus to find that faint, fading spark. He's dying! He'll be dead soon no matter what I do.
I have to do something! What do I - what do we - have to lose?
And with a final, desperate leap of faith, Alistair uncorked the dubious bottle once more and tipped it over Loghain's lips, pouring the clear liquid past his clenched teeth, making sure it didn't spill down Loghain's jaw and onto the pillow. With bated breath Alistair searched Loghain's face for any signs of a reaction to a potential poison. But there was nothing. The pallor of his face didn't change at all, and neither did the slow pace of his faint, shallow breaths. Alistair waited by the bedside, focusing on all the small signs that Loghain was still a sleeping man, not a dead body.
Come on, work! Alistair thought, he pleaded... but for once he couldn't pray. He remembered all too well how cautiously Morrigan had guarded her poisonous concoctions, keeping her work, especially the kind with any magical ingredients or properties, far away from his sparring and training spots, protecting them with rune-covered leathers and safe distance. If I chant, it just might strip any magic from the potion. So I can't! That potion just has to work!
After what felt like an eternity, Alistair decided that Loghain's breathing did seem deeper than before. Was it a trick of the light, or was a hint of colour returning to his face as well? Alistair watched and listened with desperate intensity, but he still couldn't tell for certain.
The candle in his hand flickered, almost used up.
As far as nurses go, he thought bitterly, any Chantry sister, or even your average barmaid, experienced with drunks, would do better than me.
And so, Alistair did all he could do: he kept on staring at Loghain, and waited for any sign of an improvement.
When Solona was injured he'd let himself be chased out of this very room by Flemeth, by Morrigan. But now, charging brontos couldn't drag him away. The ghost of Flemeth herself could storm down the fireplace, and set the entire hut ablaze with her dragon breath, and it wouldn't matter. Alistair was staying right here by Loghain's side, and watching him for any change.
For better or for worse.
Loghain was alone. Maric and Rowan leaving him should have plunged him into despair, but the memory of their reassurances glowed within him: that they loved him, that he didn't need to hold himself apart from life to mourn them. Their memory held the fierce, fresh ache of loss at bay.
Then Loghain's solitude was broken by a distant call. It wasn't anything as simple as a voice. It was a faint sense of familiar presence in the taint: a gentle heat, the distant radiance of another Warden's life force. No, not just any Warden: Loghain felt a soul-deep certainty that he'd know this sunlit warmth anywhere. Alistair! Loghain's heart leapt with a sharp pang of hope. Alistair's alive! And close.
He closed his eyes and cast his senses out into the taint, searching. His head lifted and he turned, focusing on that radiated call - worlds apart from the death sentence of the Calling - facing it with the same blind, instinctive certainty that turns plants to face the sun.
There. That was where Loghain longed to be. Out of the cold and darkness of his tomb, away from the grief and solitude of his loss. In the living world. In the sunlight. With Alistair.
That inner glow was a beacon by which Loghain navigated the maze of the Deep Roads. Its warmth eased the soreness in his body as he scaled one punishing upward incline after another.
The journey was a struggle every bit as nightmarish as trying to escape from the Black City itself. There were caves whose floors fell away without warning into treacherous pits. There were rockslides littered with sharp bones of deep stalkers, tunnels whose walls were no longer firm stone well-lit by veins of lyrium; now they were lightless, slimy mud. But Loghain ignored all of these barriers. His attention was fixed as surely as a compass needle on his goal.
That distant sense of warmth guided Loghain without hesitation through a labyrinth that would otherwise have left him lost and stumbling to his death in the dark. He trudged to the peak of one more interminable climb, and rounded a bend to see the finish of all his struggles: a dead end, the tunnel caved in, nothing but a featureless slope of dirt from floor to ceiling. It should have been an utterly devastating sight. But instead he hearkened to the growing sense of life and light now just beyond his reach, and dug into the fallen earth with his bare hands, throwing aside rocks and soil, forcing his arms deep, then his shoulders, striving against the earth with his whole body, feeling it loosen and shift before him, until at last his hands pushed through and broke the surface. He hurled himself into the gap, struggling upward, flinging aside clumps of earth as he exploded into the light of the living world. He drew a deep lungful of the free air and released it in a great shout of triumph, as he hauled himself from the pit in the earth and collapsed on his back on green, untainted grass, gazing up at the endless, glorious sky.
He knew this place. Alistair's Clearing. Loghain remembered smiling to himself as he wrote that name on his newest map. Buoyed by that memory, by the triumph of his escape, by the warmth that now felt close enough to breathe its benediction like sunlight on his skin, he homed in on that gentle beacon, like a wanderer lost in the Wilds heading for the warm golden glow of a campfire.
In the waking world, Loghain opened his eyes.
I'm alive.
He turned his head, and observed a familiar form, slumped and snoring close by.
And so is Alistair. Alive and well.
Loghain smiled.
A hand came to rest on Alistair's head, and he woke with a blink. That dream of his youth among the templars still clung to his mind, and he thought for an instant that the Revered Mother had caught him sleeping, face down in a book he was supposed to have been studying. He sighed and buried his face in cloth softer than an ordinary dusty tome's pages, trying to avoid her punishment for laziness for just one more second.
"Get up here," croaked a voice hoarse from disuse. "No point in getting a cricked neck."
What? Alistair opened one bleary eye and peered up. ... Loghain? He jolted up, wide eyes taking in the sight of Loghain moving, looking back, talking! Alive! "You! You're... You!"
Loghain arched an eyebrow and snorted at Alistair's flustered surprise, mouth quirking in an almost-grin.
"Um. Course you are," Alistair muttered in a shamefaced aside. He's not dying! Oh, thank the Maker! It worked! Alistair reached out instinctively and stopped himself the last second, his hands fidgeting with the corner of the pillow in nervous excitement, "How do you feel? Are you OK? Do you want a... - anything?"
Eyes as pale as moonlight - uncannily bright in those dark sockets, under those black brows and lashes - glinted in mute amusement. "Peace and quiet," Loghain grumbled dryly, but he still hitched himself over to make space on the bed. The caution in his initial movements faded quickly; apparently his ribs had healed enough not to hurt. "Up here, I said," a hand closed on Alistair's arm and tugged. "You look as tired as I am. Get some rest." The words were harsh, but a smile lingered in that heavylidded gaze, in the curl of a mouth still soft with sleep.
"Huh," Alistair said. "You wanna... oh." He stumbled up from the creaky chair and sat on the edge of the squeaky old bed that looked and sounded about as stable as the rest of the hut. He stretched out cautiously, doing his best to take up the smallest possible amount of space. His stare met Loghain's. His cheek met pillow. "Uh-huh."
The arm that yanked Alistair further away from the edge of the bed was peremptory, even possessive as it settled to rest draped casually over his waist. Loghain exhaled a that's-more-like-it "Hmph," and those pale eyes drifted closed.
Alistair's life - the life of a bastard, practically an orphan, and then of a chaste Chantry man - lacked situations where one would be held while falling asleep. Growing up he was taught that beds and bedrolls were to remain solitary and free of guests, in order to avoid an uncomfortable morning of scrutiny and shame, and even more uncomfortable talks with the Chantry's elders. But as a boy Alistair had slept with the hounds, and even as a man, he was familiar with the comfort of running his fingers though Dog's bristly fur and hiding his nose in the mabari's broad back. Still, deprived of the human equivalent of such interaction, he didn't quite know how to take this, nor what was expected of him if he was to play the role usually set aside for a mabari, at least in Alistair's way of the world. It was all so... odd. Loghain seemed far more likely to hold a dagger in his sleep than his hound, and yet now his arm was slung around Alistair as casually as if Alistair was a mabari pup or a pillow.
Maybe it's the potion, he decided. He does seem a bit dazed, still. But it's so good to see him awake!
The weight on the bed shifted as the mabari lifted his heavy head, turned up one floppy ear, then sighed and jumped off the bed, making space for the changing of the guard. The hound padded over to the barricaded door, turned three times and settled down again on the floor.
Alistair trusted Dog to guard them both. He burrowed his face into the dusty pillow, stretched on the mattress, thin and lumpy and impossibly comfortable to his weary body, and sighed, and slept.
Cold. Loghain had been cold and alone in the dark - he'd been lost in the Deep Roads and drowned in the foulness of a necromancer's curse and a dead ogre's memories - for so long that even the eternal strategist in him didn't pause for thought. He simply turned to the red-gold glow in his mind: the sun of the living world, a halo of light in cropped coppery hair, a gilding of firelight on muscled limbs. He reached for the warmth, the weight and pulse and scent of life, gathered it to his chest, twined his limbs with it and held it close. Buried his nose in the tickle of hair, the sleekness of skin, and breathed.
The darkness and the calls of owls told Loghain that night had fallen hours ago. The breeze coming through the open window smelled of stale water and wet leaves turned to mulch, which told Loghain he was in the swampy lowlands of the Wilds. A candle stump beside the bed, although unlit, still trailed a faint thread of smoke, which told Loghain that Alistair had been doing something that needed light, not long before.
Moonlight shone through the shutters and spilled over the bed and over Alistair's still form. The undisturbed chirping of insects and chorus of frogs, and the quiet in the taint, all told Loghain that the coast was clear. But it was the glow of Alistair's warmth - in the taint and in the flesh, lying relaxed and calm by his side, under the drape of his outstretched arm - that soothed Loghain. To be so close to someone he trusted was a rare treat: it allowed Loghain to truly relax, in a way that was usually impossible for him. He thought back to the last time he'd felt this effortless, natural ease, and realised without surprise that it'd been when he'd slept next to Maric or Rowan during their travels: fellow soldiers who he trusted with his life, and who he knew had the skills to defend his life.
The bone-deep, soul-deep comfort he felt now was nothing like the cloying feather-mattress luxury of his marital bed back in Gwaren: when he'd always been the one to do all the protecting, when he'd never for an instant been able to set aside the burdens of being a husband and a father and a Teyrn. Funny how the titles and roles he'd actually had some skill in, he'd always filled in Denerim: as Ferelden's General, and as the King and Queen's most trusted advisor. Small wonder that his rare visits back to Gwaren had weighed down his soul, like the Chevalier plate had weighed down his body after the leathers he'd worn in the Rebellion.
Now he wore no armor at all. Now there was only the lighter weight of blankets and the soft cocoon of linens around him, and the comforting warmth of a trusted body in his arms.
Lulled by the slow rise and fall of Alistair's breathing, Loghain drifted off into a healing sleep.
No Deep Roads.
No darkspawn.
Just peace.