Work Text:
Neria Surana did her best to make herself small. She had gotten quite good at that after a decade and a half of surviving under the eyes of sadistic or paranoid Templars and bigoted human Enchanters looking for a convenient back in which to stick the knives they used as handholds for climbing the ranks. Even that practice might not have sharpened her skills enough for her to survive this mess, though.
She sat hidden in her wardrobe with her back pressed to the wall, her feet flat against the floor, and her knees pulled all the way in against her chest. Her toes only barely brushed against the door and would not push it open unless she breathed too deeply. That presented a bit of a dilemma, because deep breathing was one of the keys to emotional self-regulation, and it would not matter how well she concealed herself physically if a terror demon got a sniff of her mind. On the other hand, if she revealed herself to the pair of Templars who had barricaded themselves in her room, it likely wouldn't matter how well she avoided the demons.
She'd been curled up like so almost since the chaos broke out. In the beginning she had tried to fight, to hold off the demons cascading down the tower from reaching the lowest floor where the apprentices lived. Soon, though, it had become clear that there were too many of them to stem their flow, and that her use of so much powerful battle magic only marked her out to them as a target to try to possess, and furthermore that the Templars who hadn't already fallen or fled were indiscriminately attacking anything they saw casting spells. She'd retreated to her room and found a place to hide from the Templars and the demons alike, only for Ser Vardas and Ser Bronwin to show up minutes later and claim the rest of the room as their hiding place.
Hours had passed since then, probably enough of them to make up a day and change. Neria's arms and legs had fallen asleep, but she didn't dare let her head do the same. The hunger pangs brought her to the verge of wailing, but she didn't dare do that, either.
"Neria?" a familiar voice called from outside the wardrobe. "Neria, are you in here? Isn't this your room? Neria, please tell me you're still alive! Neria!"
It sounded like Solona Amell, but Solona Amell was dead, and if the voice were coming from anywhere other than Neria's own mind, Ser Vardas and Ser Bronwin would have heard it too. Neria ignored it until it faded away, like she'd ignored every other demon who'd tried that very same trick over the course of these last long hours. If they needed to trick her, that meant they hadn't made it all the way through to the physical realm yet. With the Veil as tattered as it currently was, any attention that Neria paid them might be just what they required to manifest.
Absurdly, Neria found herself wishing that Solona were not only alive, but curled up in the wardrobe next to her. Small spaces and cramped-up limbs had always been made so much more bearable by the feel of Solona's smooth skin and soft curves, and by the firm touch of her long fingers. The smell of her sweat had always somehow managed to be more intoxicating than noxious even in tight quarters. Solona would giggle and quietly swear at the awkward discomfort of it all, the harsh curses delightfully incongruous with the sweet voice muttering them.
But even the gentlest of curses could get Neria killed here, and Solona had never been as good as her at keeping silent and still. Besides, if Neria had to go wishing Solona away from the peace beyond the Beyond, she should at least wish for her to be free.
The way things had turned out for the two of them was all so strange and cruel, even by the Circle's standards. Back when they'd been young girls stealing touches and comfort in hiding spots only slightly more spacious than this one, Solona had sometimes said, "Maybe things will be better for us when we're Harrowed." That acknowledgement of us, of a we that extended on into the dreamed-of future, was the closest she'd ever come to saying I love you. Neria herself had never even come that close. When she'd tried, the when had tasted too bitter on her tongue, too much like a poorly sugarcoated if.
And yet, they had both survived their Harrowings. Neria had gone first, and she'd almost regretted making it through, because surely she had stolen that luck from Solona. But a month later, Solona had likewise been put to the test, and she had likewise passed it. When she'd heard the news that her favorite person would be moving up into the mages' quarters as soon as she could move at all, Neria had finally allowed herself to believe in that better Solona had always whispered of so longingly.
Her belief had been shattered within a day. The Warden-Commander had come, and Solona's friend Jowan had panicked and run, and Solona had tried too hard to save everyone. Before she'd even gotten to sleep in her new bed, she'd been taken away forever. Even then, Neria had tried to console herself with the thought that at least Solona would get to be something close to free, only for Uldred and Wynne to smother that wan comfort when they'd returned to the tower with news that Ostagar had been taken by the darkspawn and all of the Wardens there killed. Neria had barely begun to wrap her head around the irony of it all — that perhaps she'd been the luckier one for remaining trapped in Kinloch Hold, which might at least keep out the darkspawn as effectively as it kept in the mages — when the demons had appeared. Soon, she would be dead too.
As tempted as Neria felt to envy Solona for getting out sooner and going down fighting, she had no way of knowing for sure how easy or how ugly her friend's death had been, nor just how brutal her own would be. There wasn't much choice between demons and darkspawn — or between either of them and Templars, for that matter. No matter how she looked at it, the reality in which she lived — the reality in which she was about to die — was more twisted than a nightmare spun by even the most fiendishly clever of fear demons.
Her exhaustion finally got the better of her, and she groaned before she could stop herself. One of her legs twitched just slightly and kicked open the wardrobe door.
"What in the Maker's name?" Ser Vardas drew her sword and crossed the room in three paces to point it into the wardrobe. "How long have you been lurking about?"
"Just a little while longer than you've been in the room, ser," Neria answered honestly. She pushed aside the curtain of hanging robes so that the Templars could see her face and her full, undistorted form, but carefully avoided moving too suddenly or in any way that could be interpreted as an attempt to cast a spell.
"She wasn't there when I searched everything at the beginning," Ser Bronwin insisted, his voice wavering with poorly suppressed panic. "It must be a demon. Even mages can't just appear out of nowhere."
"You were moving awfully quickly, ser," Neria explained, doing her best to keep her own panic from rising into her voice. "The clothes hid everything but my feet, and I kept quiet, and before you'd noticed anything you'd closed the door again and moved on." Without pausing to give them a chance to question her further, she launched directly into the case she'd been building in her head for hours. "I'm not possessed yet. A demon would have attacked you while your guard was down, not waited around hoping against hope to avoid discovery. If you kill me 'just to be safe', you'll be making the risk worse, because you have no way of burning the body, so a demon could take it once I'm no longer there to fight back."
It was the best argument she'd been able to come up with in all the time that she'd been hiding, and even so, she could think of at least three ways that it might not be enough. The first was if the Templars acted out of fear without regard for reason. The way Ser Bronwin shifted about uneasily as he watched her, Neria suspected that he might be at risk for that. Fortunately, Ser Vardas was the closer of the two, and for the moment Bronwin seemed content to let her handle things.
"'No way of burning the body,'" Vardas repeated thoughtfully as she sheathed her sword. "Is that so?" She grabbed Neria by the collar and dragged her out of the wardrobe. Neria bit down hard on her lip to keep from crying out as her cramped legs failed to hold her body up and she crumpled to the ground. "Don't you have fire at your fingertips, mage? Maybe I could persuade you to build your own pyre."
Neria had thought of that, too. "It wouldn't go well for you," she said, resisting the instinct to struggle against the Templar's grip, though it pulled her robes uncomfortably tight around her neck. "Using magic could draw the attention of the demons roaming the halls — and if that doesn't do it, your idea of 'persuading' probably will. I'll scream."
"There's no way out of it, is there?" Bronwin muttered, seemingly more to himself than to Neria or Vardas. "There aren't any reinforcements coming, are there? No matter what we do, this ends with demons finding us and killing us. Might as well be that one. Might as well be any of them."
"Pull yourself together, knight," Vardas told him without taking her eyes off Neria.
"But it isn't fair!" Ser Bronwin sounded as though he was struggling not to moan about it too loudly. "We're all going to die, all of us together, the robes who caused this mess and the knights who did all we could to try to fix it."
"It really isn't fair," Ser Vardas agreed slowly. "It really isn't survivable, either. What choices are left to us now? You're right, I think: no matter what we do, we are all going to die." She lifted Neria off of her knees, making her choke as her throat took on the brunt of her own weight. "But we will not all die alike. Some small measure of justice is still within reach."
Then she balled her free hand into a fist and swung it into Neria's face, splitting her already worried-bloody lip wide open.
This was it, then: the failure condition that Neria had feared most. She had no hope of reasoning or bargaining with such pure, petty vindictiveness.
Vardas threw her to the ground. When Neria managed against all odds to catch herself before her head struck the stone, the Templar kicked an armored boot against her chin, lengthening the gash on Neria's face and nearly snapping her neck.
Neria screamed and lashed out with gouts of magic flame that the Templar dispelled with a wave of her hand. She kept screaming when Vardas began kicking in her ribs. Breathing hurt, but Neria made herself breathe deeply to keep her voice loud and clear. If she had to, she could draw demons into the room through her body, but she would rather draw them in through the door. That way, she at least stood a chance of living to see the Templars die first.
The bedroom door slammed open. Vardas turned to face the new threat, but Neria was too beaten down to take advantage of her distraction. It was all she could do to hold her head up and her eyes open and watch as a blast of ice magic engulfed both Templars. She expected gnarled abominations to ooze into the room and devour them, but instead she saw an elven man charge in with daggers drawn and stab first Ser Bronwin and then Ser Vardas through their frost-embrittled armor. He gave the knives a sharp twist and then yanked them out, leaving behind gaping wounds that the Templars' frozen bodies crumbled around. Neither of them made a sound as they died.
"What a nice change of pace from all the nasties that burn you or zap you with lightning when you get too close," the strange man said. "I had almost forgotten that stabbing could be so easy!" He wiped the blood off on his leathers, then sheathed the daggers and offered a hand to Neria.
Neria did not take it. "Well, that's... creative," she mumbled, more to herself than to the demon.
"Neria! It really is you!" Neria barely had time to register the voice before Solona Amell dashed into the room and brushed aside the stranger to kneel down next to her. "Maker, so much blood. Wynne, where are you?"
"There, much more predictable," Neria sighed. The demon draped itself over her in a gentle embrace, and she was too weak to fight back. Worse, she was too weak to want to; she could feel Solona's warmth, smell her subtly unique scent, hear her precious voice murmuring words of comfort when Senior Enchanter Wynne — another demon? or the same one, somehow? — stepped in to close the gash on Neria's face and ease away the pain from her battered chest. If her life ended like this, then so be it. She was tired of being jerked around by fate.
"Are we sure this is a good idea?" a new voice asked. Neria looked up to see a human man in heavy armor — not Templar armor, oddly, but still somehow familiar — looming in the doorway. "I know it's a little late to say so for their sakes, but maybe they had a reason for attacking her."
Solona squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled sharply. She brushed her fingers across Neria's cheek, and Neria got the sense that it was a needy sort of touch, as though Solona were trying to ground herself. Then she stood and turned to face the armored shem. "Alistair," she said, her voice cold and steady, "since we started climbing this tower we have met several mages who were not possessed, and precisely zero Templars who were not enthralled. I am deeply curious what makes you think that in this particular instance we should waste time considering whether the people we stopped from beating to death an unresisting victim might actually have been the good guys."
"Oh. Sorry." The human — Alistair? — hung his head like a hound receiving a scolding. "You're right; that was stupid of me. Let's just forget I said it, shall we?"
"Thank you. Let's." Solona took another deep breath, and some of the tension slipped away from the line of her shoulders as she exhaled.
That armor Alistair wore — hadn't the Warden-Commander who'd taken Solona away been wearing something similar? Once Neria recognized it, she realized that the tabard was the same silver and cobalt blue pattern as Solona's robes.
"Were you quite certain that all the Grey Wardens died at Ostagar?" Neria asked Wynne.
"It was a battlefield, child. How could I possibly have been certain?" The healer chuckled as she finished up restoring the circulation to Neria's stiffened limbs. Neria had never much liked Senior Enchanter Wynne's condescending wry humor, though she couldn't blame her for cultivating whatever sort of laughter would grow in the tower's barren stone.
"This is real, Neria. I'm no more a demon than you are." When Neria turned back to Solona, she was holding out her hand. Too exhausted for caution — and too hopeful, maybe, though hope itself could be exhausting — Neria took hold. Solona and Wynne both helped her to her feet, and nothing horrible happened.
"What are you doing here?" Neria asked, leaning heavily against Solona and shamelessly basking in her scent. Her sweat smelled a little bit different when soaked into leather, but not a bad kind of different.
"I came to invoke a treaty between the Circle and the Order of the Grey," Solona explained. Her voice sounded a little different too. It rasped a bit, as though she'd been speaking louder and more frequently than she was used to. "Now I'm just trying to save whoever can still be saved."
"I'll just... hide myself back in the wardrobe, then," Neria offered.
"I'm not leaving you alone again!" Solona got the arm she wasn't using to wield her staff around Neria's waist and pulled her even more tightly against her side.
"I would only slow you down."
"I don't care about that! You don't have to fight at all if you don't want to! Just stay close to Wynne; we've already worked out a formation to keep her out of the melee."
Formation? Melee? Solona had only been a Grey Warden for a matter of weeks. How could she already be talking as though it all came so naturally? "I'm not afraid to fight," Neria clarified. "I'm just..." I'm afraid I'll have to watch you die, she realized. I'm afraid of being the one to get you killed. She couldn't say that, though. It was far too close to that impossible I love you.
"Neria, listen to me." Solona leaned in even closer and pressed her forehead to Neria's. Neria could feel Solona's breath against her face as she continued, "I am going save the Circle, and then I am going to leave it once and for all, and when I do leave, I am taking you with me. Blight or no Blight, things will be better for us on the outside."
There was no maybe this time, Neria noted. Solona sounded so certain that better was a thing that existed. If she'd already had a taste of it herself, then maybe she had a right to that certainty.
"All right, then." Neria said. "Let's do it." Secretly, she felt just as certain that it would all go wrong again. She might have stopped fearing that this was some demon's trick, but hadn't she just been thinking how reality could prove even worse than the machinations of demons?
Nevertheless, she held Solona's arm and followed her out the door.