[fic] ferro comitante [1/?]
Title: Ferro Comitante 1/?
Words: 2882
Rating: PG
Characters: Alistair, Cullen, randoms
Summary: There's a lot of things wrong in the land of Ferelden -- little, little things. But who's going to add them all up? And what will be found when the total is taken? An AU -- until the protagonists discover it's an AU, that is.
ferro comitante
my sword as my companion
1.
Alistair was always the last one to know when it came to monastery gossip, but even he heard about it when Cullen volunteered to go to the Tower of Magi, for it was the subject of piercing whispers wherever Cullen wasn't. It wasn't like he and Cullen were close, of course, since Alistair had never managed to fit in among the faithful and Cullen was famously devout, but Cullen just wasn't the sort of guy whose name one heard bandied about in the halls. Since the news had spread, though, Alistair could hardly turn a corner without running into someone's opinion.
"I'm not surprised," Hadden informed his crowd of novice sycophants after weapons practice, his square figure blocking the entrance to the practice ring. "The guy was always bleedin' fascinated with the ruddy ingrates. Don't see why. All that leads to is an eternity in the Maker's hells, that does." No one had ever accused Hadden of an open mind, which was probably why the man would make Knight-Commander before thirty.
Keane's expression of perpetual bewilderment only deepened when considering the Cullen dilemma. Alistair had always sort of liked Keane for his constant confusion, because sitting next to the man in class made anybody look like an utter brainiac. "I just don't see why the Revered Mother would let him go," Keane said plaintively near a storage closet to his equally clueless buddy, holding his square hands out palm-up. "He's only going to be a danger to himself there, right? With all the temptations and mages and stuff?"
Leland was typically brusque about it on the breakfast line. "He's where he wants to be, doing the Chantry's work. Don't see what's the fuss. None of this lot would want to go there anyhow. So much the better if he's keeping those sodding arrogant mage-types in line," he declared to everyone in earshot, and set his mash and eggs on the table with clattering finality.
Cullen himself was little-seen. Privately, Alistair thought Cullen was a fool for his fascination with the mages, too, and he was aware of the hypocrisy of it, the little mud idol strung round his neck a spot of uncanny warmth beneath his shirt day in and day out. At least Alistair kept his dangerous runic fascinations to himself, though. Cullen was almost flashy about it in his absent-minded disregard of watching eyes, nose buried intently in some history of magic and templars, squinting at old scrolls in the library, and asking why, why, always asking why. There was no damned why, Alistair wanted to snap sometimes. It was the way of the Chantry, and no one was ever going to give him a better answer than that.
But now Cullen, fresh out of his initiation rite and all new-minted as a Templar, was heading off to the Tower, an assignment any normal man would dread, an assignment for which Cullen had volunteered as soon as he was able. Everyone was giving Cullen a wide berth. It seemed wrong, somehow; unsportsmanlike. Cullen had been given to the Chantry at birth, had been here longer than almost anyone, and yet on the eve on his departure, he sat in a little island of isolation by the corner window.
Cullen didn't dislike him anymore than anyone else did, anyway, so far as Alistair knew. So the man might tolerate a word from Alistair on his last night in the abbey. "Mind if I sit?" Alistair asked, holding his tray.
Cullen looked up at him, startled. "Er, right. Sure," he said, and then stared down at his meal.
They were a few moments in silence as Alistair prodded his gruel without interest and Cullen sawed at a slab of dry meat on his plate, until Alistair finally said, "It's got to be weird, leaving."
Cullen shrugged. "I think it's about time," he said. Alistair had to lean in to hear him. "I think it's pretty clear" --Cullen's soft voice fell even further-- "that this is no home for me anymore."
It'd never been a home for Alistair, but Cullen might as well have set up a cot in front of the statue of Andraste in the chapel. That's why it was doubly weird that he'd request to be sent off to the Magi and earn the doubt and mistrust of his brothers thereby. Straight to the point, then.
"Why'd you volunteer, man?" Alistair asked, and watched Cullen's jaw tighten. "You know they all think you're mad for it."
"I don't care what they say," Cullen said flatly. "I put my duty first. That's what matters."
"Well," Alistair said skeptically, "yeah, sure, but -- hey, it's not about lyrium, is it?" Cullen drew back, visibly horrified, and Alistair waved his hands soothingly. "Sorry. Didn't really figure it was." That had been Mabry's pet theory, but Mabry had all the brains of a sparrow and half the imaginative capacity. "I mean, Chantry controls whatever the Circle gets, and it's not like you're running to Orzammar or something."
"They really say that?" Cullen looked disgusted, a quick flash of feeling that wrenched his broad features. "I serve the Maker and the Chantry, for Andraste's sake."
“Yeah, and the serving girl serves us stew, technically speaking. If you can even call it stew when it’s all that sort of weird gray-anyway." Alistair cleared his throat. "I'm certainly not saying that you don't." He abandoned the pretense of paying any attention to the gruel on his plate and turned to face Cullen more fully, one hand clenching up on the pitted wooden table. “But everyone knows how you are about mages. Asking about them all the time, eyes like saucers every time another Templar comes back with a story, and now volunteering to up and go... you see how it looks odd, right?"
“What is it to you? What is it to anyone what I decide to do?” Cullen said, raising his chin, dark brown eyes meeting Alistair's own with unwonted forthrightness. “The Chantry needs Templars there anyway. If the Revered Mother assented to it, it’s not up to us to question.“
“Hell it’s not,” Alistair said. “There’s a lot I question about the Revered Mother.”
"Well, you shouldn't."
"Cullen, I'm not trying to attack you!" Alistair said in exasperation. "But if you're going to the Tower, you ought to be prepared. The Magi are -- the Magi are highly -- highly, um. Questionable." He frowned, shot a look past Cullen to the gardens visible through the window. The Revered Mother liked to say that the mages were a lot of abominations-in-waiting, and their Tower a den of snakes. Alistair thought that was a sorry way to talk about people, but... well.
“You sound like the Revered Mother,” Cullen muttered. Alistair raised an eyebrow at him, and Cullen said, “Well, you do.”
“Honored as I am to be compared to the finest old bird to spread her wings since the last High Dragon,” Alistair said dryly, “you don't think she might have a point, Cullen? The last archdemon was slain two hundred years ago, but new mages are born every day. Just think about it.”
Cullen shrugged noncommittally. The next morning, he was gone.
And Alistair had envied him a little, then, for the certainty with which he went. There were days he wasn’t certain if his boot laced up or down, let alone whether or not the Chantry had the right of it about mages. Perhaps Cullen had the right of it, after his own besotted fashion.
Cullen didn't go alone, of course -- Orval was being sent to the Tower as well, though he'd not volunteered for it, and his brother Paley was headed for Ostagar, to support the team of Templars who had been sent out there to root in the ruins for a rumored family of maleficarum. At any rate, Alistair left Cullen to his glorified babysitting, for he was in the second group of novices due to take their final vows that year.
The night before becoming a Templar was to be spent in solitary religious contemplation in various nooks and crannies of the abbey. No one was assigned spots, though, and it wasn't a very big abbey, so Alistair wound up sharing the vegetable garden with two ripe and somber souls who seemed intent on misting the herbs all night, judging by their heavy mouth-breathing. Alistair thought he would go mad with distraction, kneeling there in the northeast corner near the turnips as Bromley sniffled every two minutes by the cabbage patch and Edric mumbled hilariously lisped snatches of prayer and the Chant.
He shifted uneasily in his heavy armor, the red steel making little noises like keys being rubbed together. His knees soon began to ache. Then his neck, from attempting to keep it inclined at an angle of suitable piety. A few ants marched by him, manfully hoisting up some crumbs with their fellows, more martial by far in their discipline and coordination than he himself could ever hope to be. A mosquito attempted to make a meal of his right cheek, dissuaded only by a rather forceful flick that left his dimple area stinging. (He didn't actually have a dimple, a fabrication error the mosquito had apparently been trying to correct.)
He rolled his shoulders, feeling like a golem, and regarded the gritty dirt. He tried to remember Transfigurations 1:1-5, and only remembered that one bit about magic and man that everybody already knew -- oh, and that bit about "they shall be called maleficars, accursed ones." He'd tried that line on Garrick once after the fellow cheated blatantly at fox-and-hounds, but the brothers hadn't found it quite as funny as he had, though Alistair had practiced his throaty unctuous delivery of the line for weeks, awaiting just the right time to unleash it. One had to inject interest into the Chant somehow.
Not less than an hour into the vigil, Alistair couldn't even pretend that his thoughts were devotional in nature. He snuck a peek around. Edric was rocking a little bit as he intoned his prayers, the bliss on his round face frankly off-putting. Bromley sneezed wetly onto his breastplate, droplets glittering on the metal like a necklace of plague. The moon poured light into the garden like a maiden with a water jug, illuminating the simple graven face of the Maker's Prophet swimming above them all.
Alistair breathed in deep of the cold night air and yet his thoughts remained below. Cold wind knifed through the sliver-like gaps between the plates of his armor, raising goosebumps where he wasn't sweating, and he thought of the places he could be that weren't here. He thought of Redcliffe Castle and its high ceilings, the stolid stone and firm square architecture, and of the arl, whom he'd never known not gray-haired and grave. He thought of the arl's pretty Orlesian wife and the twist of her pretty lips as she regarded him.
The weight of all the thinking bowed his head the way the demands of obedient piety had not, and the shadows in the garden crept on like mildew and slime. This was why Alistair hated the damn quiet, why he'd fill it with any idiotic or ill-considered word whenever it stretched its arms all unwelcome, because the silence always turned him maudlin and moping like he was ten years old and homesick for hay. Really, he’d take the damned Korcari Wilds if he had to, and all the cunning Chasind folk those woods cared to throw at him. He’d cobble an Orlesian’s pretty boots, smuggle for the dwarves, go flower-picking for the Dalish, whatever. Just not here, not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not a Templar.
What was he to do, though? In his dreams, he was a Grey Warden, a hero who cut down demons to save Ferelden from annihilation. But that order had been finished off centuries ago, and no one was going to show up to save him at the last moment with a Rite of Conscription, no matter how dramatically satisfying a denouement that might have been. Over time, Alistair had more or less accepted his fate as a Chantry drone, he’d thought - come to be quite mature and reasonable about the whole thing, really. But now on the eve of the event, all he wanted to do was dig in his heels and shout no.
Which was impossible, stupid, and irresponsible.
He found himself praying for it anyway in the silverite darkness, the articulated joints of his gloves creaking as his hands tightened around one another. He prayed wordlessly for rescue, setting his teeth against the cry that threatened to tear out of his throat. Maybe rescue would come as a forgotten Grey Warden from some dusty corner of the Anderfels, rekindling that dormant order with a few judiciously plucked young talents -- Alistair wasn't the best, but he was better than most, right? He was good enough.
Or maybe someone could tell his father he existed, and King Maric himself could march into the abbey (what a thought, the Revered Mother would be thrown into a worse tizzy than a pot on the boil). The idea made Alistair chuckle without mirth, and he could feel the sharp glance Edric threw at him. Yes, he could just picture it, the glorious King Maric (greater than life, a good seven feet tall at least) striding in to announce in a big booming voice, “You cannot have him, Chantry! He is my blood and I shall raise him up.” Son of a serving girl, fostered in a bleeding barn. Right.
Or he could just say "no," when those presiding over the ceremony asked if it was truly his will to do this thing, but Alistair knew himself well enough to know that was the least likely outcome of all. His shoulders hunched, his spine aching, and he opened his sticky, sleepy eyes to see faint light streaking the pearly mist with rose.
Bleakly, he raised his gaze to the horizon. He fancied he could see the Maker's turned back in the shadows of the dawn, taste His sorrow in the sodden damp. Sore and miserable, Alistair clanked to his feet. Bromley, poor dog, was shivering where he stood, had probably taken an ague in the cold and wet, while Edric had yet to unfold himself from before the statue of Andraste. The ass could probably spend another week fasting and praying his way to worthiness.
After the ordeal in the gardens, the ceremony itself was short and simple. The Knight-Commander of the town Chantry asked if it was his will to be given to this band of brothers; Alistair gave a wooden "yes" along with all the other novices. The Revered Mother herself placed her withered claw atop Alistair's head as she called down the Maker's blessings, her fingers tightening a little in his hair as if to warn her wayward charge not to disrupt the ritual with any improvised improvements. Alistair, nearly asleep on his feet, could have told her not to worry if that "yes" hadn't filled his mouth with the taste of ashes.
The Mother raised her thin voice high, reciting the Commandments of the Maker. When she paused, the Knight-Commander spoke, though in truth, his words ran together in Alistair's hearing. It was something about magic and sin -- when wasn't it one or the other with the Chantry? -- and as the Knight-Commander went on about their duties to the Maker and the Chantry as if the two were one, the sisters went round to each of the novices in turn. It was pretty sister Euthalia who came before Alistair, a pinch of lyrium dust twinkling like crushed stars between her fingers, and she placed it on his tongue, and slit his world.
The lyrium lit him right up like a tower's beacon. The essence of power and dreaming sluiced through him, and in its grip he saw a great man in massive armor with haunted eyes, and his heart ached for the grief and fear writ 'cross that stranger's beloved face. He felt himself raise a sword again and again until his arms trembled, an endless whistling song as the blade cleaved the air, endless blood as it rose and fell. Before his eyes there stood a single, golden prince, destiny his mantle and glory his crown -- betrayed, felled before his time. Before his eyes there stood the dread beauty of a corrupted god baring its teeth, its flared, taut wings shivering in challenge -- screaming, its blood-lustrous eyes insensible and mad.
The eyes boiled, red ruby to topaz, golden and cunning. Scales softened to skin, mere human flesh, the glitter of madness retreating, and yet there remained that beauty, that same dread beauty, and a sharp, sharp smile that doubled in his vision, curved like dragons' fangs --
It was well into afternoon before Alistair came back to himself, gasping. Someone, perhaps Sister Euthalia, must have led him back to his quarters, though he didn't remember anything between now and the lyrium. Seated on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, he caught his breath and stared at his boots. He was a Templar now.
Words: 2882
Rating: PG
Characters: Alistair, Cullen, randoms
Summary: There's a lot of things wrong in the land of Ferelden -- little, little things. But who's going to add them all up? And what will be found when the total is taken? An AU -- until the protagonists discover it's an AU, that is.
ferro comitante
my sword as my companion
1.
Alistair was always the last one to know when it came to monastery gossip, but even he heard about it when Cullen volunteered to go to the Tower of Magi, for it was the subject of piercing whispers wherever Cullen wasn't. It wasn't like he and Cullen were close, of course, since Alistair had never managed to fit in among the faithful and Cullen was famously devout, but Cullen just wasn't the sort of guy whose name one heard bandied about in the halls. Since the news had spread, though, Alistair could hardly turn a corner without running into someone's opinion.
"I'm not surprised," Hadden informed his crowd of novice sycophants after weapons practice, his square figure blocking the entrance to the practice ring. "The guy was always bleedin' fascinated with the ruddy ingrates. Don't see why. All that leads to is an eternity in the Maker's hells, that does." No one had ever accused Hadden of an open mind, which was probably why the man would make Knight-Commander before thirty.
Keane's expression of perpetual bewilderment only deepened when considering the Cullen dilemma. Alistair had always sort of liked Keane for his constant confusion, because sitting next to the man in class made anybody look like an utter brainiac. "I just don't see why the Revered Mother would let him go," Keane said plaintively near a storage closet to his equally clueless buddy, holding his square hands out palm-up. "He's only going to be a danger to himself there, right? With all the temptations and mages and stuff?"
Leland was typically brusque about it on the breakfast line. "He's where he wants to be, doing the Chantry's work. Don't see what's the fuss. None of this lot would want to go there anyhow. So much the better if he's keeping those sodding arrogant mage-types in line," he declared to everyone in earshot, and set his mash and eggs on the table with clattering finality.
Cullen himself was little-seen. Privately, Alistair thought Cullen was a fool for his fascination with the mages, too, and he was aware of the hypocrisy of it, the little mud idol strung round his neck a spot of uncanny warmth beneath his shirt day in and day out. At least Alistair kept his dangerous runic fascinations to himself, though. Cullen was almost flashy about it in his absent-minded disregard of watching eyes, nose buried intently in some history of magic and templars, squinting at old scrolls in the library, and asking why, why, always asking why. There was no damned why, Alistair wanted to snap sometimes. It was the way of the Chantry, and no one was ever going to give him a better answer than that.
But now Cullen, fresh out of his initiation rite and all new-minted as a Templar, was heading off to the Tower, an assignment any normal man would dread, an assignment for which Cullen had volunteered as soon as he was able. Everyone was giving Cullen a wide berth. It seemed wrong, somehow; unsportsmanlike. Cullen had been given to the Chantry at birth, had been here longer than almost anyone, and yet on the eve on his departure, he sat in a little island of isolation by the corner window.
Cullen didn't dislike him anymore than anyone else did, anyway, so far as Alistair knew. So the man might tolerate a word from Alistair on his last night in the abbey. "Mind if I sit?" Alistair asked, holding his tray.
Cullen looked up at him, startled. "Er, right. Sure," he said, and then stared down at his meal.
They were a few moments in silence as Alistair prodded his gruel without interest and Cullen sawed at a slab of dry meat on his plate, until Alistair finally said, "It's got to be weird, leaving."
Cullen shrugged. "I think it's about time," he said. Alistair had to lean in to hear him. "I think it's pretty clear" --Cullen's soft voice fell even further-- "that this is no home for me anymore."
It'd never been a home for Alistair, but Cullen might as well have set up a cot in front of the statue of Andraste in the chapel. That's why it was doubly weird that he'd request to be sent off to the Magi and earn the doubt and mistrust of his brothers thereby. Straight to the point, then.
"Why'd you volunteer, man?" Alistair asked, and watched Cullen's jaw tighten. "You know they all think you're mad for it."
"I don't care what they say," Cullen said flatly. "I put my duty first. That's what matters."
"Well," Alistair said skeptically, "yeah, sure, but -- hey, it's not about lyrium, is it?" Cullen drew back, visibly horrified, and Alistair waved his hands soothingly. "Sorry. Didn't really figure it was." That had been Mabry's pet theory, but Mabry had all the brains of a sparrow and half the imaginative capacity. "I mean, Chantry controls whatever the Circle gets, and it's not like you're running to Orzammar or something."
"They really say that?" Cullen looked disgusted, a quick flash of feeling that wrenched his broad features. "I serve the Maker and the Chantry, for Andraste's sake."
“Yeah, and the serving girl serves us stew, technically speaking. If you can even call it stew when it’s all that sort of weird gray-anyway." Alistair cleared his throat. "I'm certainly not saying that you don't." He abandoned the pretense of paying any attention to the gruel on his plate and turned to face Cullen more fully, one hand clenching up on the pitted wooden table. “But everyone knows how you are about mages. Asking about them all the time, eyes like saucers every time another Templar comes back with a story, and now volunteering to up and go... you see how it looks odd, right?"
“What is it to you? What is it to anyone what I decide to do?” Cullen said, raising his chin, dark brown eyes meeting Alistair's own with unwonted forthrightness. “The Chantry needs Templars there anyway. If the Revered Mother assented to it, it’s not up to us to question.“
“Hell it’s not,” Alistair said. “There’s a lot I question about the Revered Mother.”
"Well, you shouldn't."
"Cullen, I'm not trying to attack you!" Alistair said in exasperation. "But if you're going to the Tower, you ought to be prepared. The Magi are -- the Magi are highly -- highly, um. Questionable." He frowned, shot a look past Cullen to the gardens visible through the window. The Revered Mother liked to say that the mages were a lot of abominations-in-waiting, and their Tower a den of snakes. Alistair thought that was a sorry way to talk about people, but... well.
“You sound like the Revered Mother,” Cullen muttered. Alistair raised an eyebrow at him, and Cullen said, “Well, you do.”
“Honored as I am to be compared to the finest old bird to spread her wings since the last High Dragon,” Alistair said dryly, “you don't think she might have a point, Cullen? The last archdemon was slain two hundred years ago, but new mages are born every day. Just think about it.”
Cullen shrugged noncommittally. The next morning, he was gone.
And Alistair had envied him a little, then, for the certainty with which he went. There were days he wasn’t certain if his boot laced up or down, let alone whether or not the Chantry had the right of it about mages. Perhaps Cullen had the right of it, after his own besotted fashion.
Cullen didn't go alone, of course -- Orval was being sent to the Tower as well, though he'd not volunteered for it, and his brother Paley was headed for Ostagar, to support the team of Templars who had been sent out there to root in the ruins for a rumored family of maleficarum. At any rate, Alistair left Cullen to his glorified babysitting, for he was in the second group of novices due to take their final vows that year.
The night before becoming a Templar was to be spent in solitary religious contemplation in various nooks and crannies of the abbey. No one was assigned spots, though, and it wasn't a very big abbey, so Alistair wound up sharing the vegetable garden with two ripe and somber souls who seemed intent on misting the herbs all night, judging by their heavy mouth-breathing. Alistair thought he would go mad with distraction, kneeling there in the northeast corner near the turnips as Bromley sniffled every two minutes by the cabbage patch and Edric mumbled hilariously lisped snatches of prayer and the Chant.
He shifted uneasily in his heavy armor, the red steel making little noises like keys being rubbed together. His knees soon began to ache. Then his neck, from attempting to keep it inclined at an angle of suitable piety. A few ants marched by him, manfully hoisting up some crumbs with their fellows, more martial by far in their discipline and coordination than he himself could ever hope to be. A mosquito attempted to make a meal of his right cheek, dissuaded only by a rather forceful flick that left his dimple area stinging. (He didn't actually have a dimple, a fabrication error the mosquito had apparently been trying to correct.)
He rolled his shoulders, feeling like a golem, and regarded the gritty dirt. He tried to remember Transfigurations 1:1-5, and only remembered that one bit about magic and man that everybody already knew -- oh, and that bit about "they shall be called maleficars, accursed ones." He'd tried that line on Garrick once after the fellow cheated blatantly at fox-and-hounds, but the brothers hadn't found it quite as funny as he had, though Alistair had practiced his throaty unctuous delivery of the line for weeks, awaiting just the right time to unleash it. One had to inject interest into the Chant somehow.
Not less than an hour into the vigil, Alistair couldn't even pretend that his thoughts were devotional in nature. He snuck a peek around. Edric was rocking a little bit as he intoned his prayers, the bliss on his round face frankly off-putting. Bromley sneezed wetly onto his breastplate, droplets glittering on the metal like a necklace of plague. The moon poured light into the garden like a maiden with a water jug, illuminating the simple graven face of the Maker's Prophet swimming above them all.
Alistair breathed in deep of the cold night air and yet his thoughts remained below. Cold wind knifed through the sliver-like gaps between the plates of his armor, raising goosebumps where he wasn't sweating, and he thought of the places he could be that weren't here. He thought of Redcliffe Castle and its high ceilings, the stolid stone and firm square architecture, and of the arl, whom he'd never known not gray-haired and grave. He thought of the arl's pretty Orlesian wife and the twist of her pretty lips as she regarded him.
The weight of all the thinking bowed his head the way the demands of obedient piety had not, and the shadows in the garden crept on like mildew and slime. This was why Alistair hated the damn quiet, why he'd fill it with any idiotic or ill-considered word whenever it stretched its arms all unwelcome, because the silence always turned him maudlin and moping like he was ten years old and homesick for hay. Really, he’d take the damned Korcari Wilds if he had to, and all the cunning Chasind folk those woods cared to throw at him. He’d cobble an Orlesian’s pretty boots, smuggle for the dwarves, go flower-picking for the Dalish, whatever. Just not here, not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not a Templar.
What was he to do, though? In his dreams, he was a Grey Warden, a hero who cut down demons to save Ferelden from annihilation. But that order had been finished off centuries ago, and no one was going to show up to save him at the last moment with a Rite of Conscription, no matter how dramatically satisfying a denouement that might have been. Over time, Alistair had more or less accepted his fate as a Chantry drone, he’d thought - come to be quite mature and reasonable about the whole thing, really. But now on the eve of the event, all he wanted to do was dig in his heels and shout no.
Which was impossible, stupid, and irresponsible.
He found himself praying for it anyway in the silverite darkness, the articulated joints of his gloves creaking as his hands tightened around one another. He prayed wordlessly for rescue, setting his teeth against the cry that threatened to tear out of his throat. Maybe rescue would come as a forgotten Grey Warden from some dusty corner of the Anderfels, rekindling that dormant order with a few judiciously plucked young talents -- Alistair wasn't the best, but he was better than most, right? He was good enough.
Or maybe someone could tell his father he existed, and King Maric himself could march into the abbey (what a thought, the Revered Mother would be thrown into a worse tizzy than a pot on the boil). The idea made Alistair chuckle without mirth, and he could feel the sharp glance Edric threw at him. Yes, he could just picture it, the glorious King Maric (greater than life, a good seven feet tall at least) striding in to announce in a big booming voice, “You cannot have him, Chantry! He is my blood and I shall raise him up.” Son of a serving girl, fostered in a bleeding barn. Right.
Or he could just say "no," when those presiding over the ceremony asked if it was truly his will to do this thing, but Alistair knew himself well enough to know that was the least likely outcome of all. His shoulders hunched, his spine aching, and he opened his sticky, sleepy eyes to see faint light streaking the pearly mist with rose.
Bleakly, he raised his gaze to the horizon. He fancied he could see the Maker's turned back in the shadows of the dawn, taste His sorrow in the sodden damp. Sore and miserable, Alistair clanked to his feet. Bromley, poor dog, was shivering where he stood, had probably taken an ague in the cold and wet, while Edric had yet to unfold himself from before the statue of Andraste. The ass could probably spend another week fasting and praying his way to worthiness.
After the ordeal in the gardens, the ceremony itself was short and simple. The Knight-Commander of the town Chantry asked if it was his will to be given to this band of brothers; Alistair gave a wooden "yes" along with all the other novices. The Revered Mother herself placed her withered claw atop Alistair's head as she called down the Maker's blessings, her fingers tightening a little in his hair as if to warn her wayward charge not to disrupt the ritual with any improvised improvements. Alistair, nearly asleep on his feet, could have told her not to worry if that "yes" hadn't filled his mouth with the taste of ashes.
The Mother raised her thin voice high, reciting the Commandments of the Maker. When she paused, the Knight-Commander spoke, though in truth, his words ran together in Alistair's hearing. It was something about magic and sin -- when wasn't it one or the other with the Chantry? -- and as the Knight-Commander went on about their duties to the Maker and the Chantry as if the two were one, the sisters went round to each of the novices in turn. It was pretty sister Euthalia who came before Alistair, a pinch of lyrium dust twinkling like crushed stars between her fingers, and she placed it on his tongue, and slit his world.
The lyrium lit him right up like a tower's beacon. The essence of power and dreaming sluiced through him, and in its grip he saw a great man in massive armor with haunted eyes, and his heart ached for the grief and fear writ 'cross that stranger's beloved face. He felt himself raise a sword again and again until his arms trembled, an endless whistling song as the blade cleaved the air, endless blood as it rose and fell. Before his eyes there stood a single, golden prince, destiny his mantle and glory his crown -- betrayed, felled before his time. Before his eyes there stood the dread beauty of a corrupted god baring its teeth, its flared, taut wings shivering in challenge -- screaming, its blood-lustrous eyes insensible and mad.
The eyes boiled, red ruby to topaz, golden and cunning. Scales softened to skin, mere human flesh, the glitter of madness retreating, and yet there remained that beauty, that same dread beauty, and a sharp, sharp smile that doubled in his vision, curved like dragons' fangs --
It was well into afternoon before Alistair came back to himself, gasping. Someone, perhaps Sister Euthalia, must have led him back to his quarters, though he didn't remember anything between now and the lyrium. Seated on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, he caught his breath and stared at his boots. He was a Templar now.