Chapter Text
A balled-up silken handkerchief stained with greasy finger-smears plodded onto the corner of Calivan's desk. He took a swallow of wine to wash down the cloying, throat-thickening flavour of pomegranate and date, a drop of ruby-red dribbling down his stubbled chin, ultimately disappearing into the burgundy weave of his robe. He thumbed through a stack of parchment, seeking out a particular missive, while the digits of his other hand felt the suckling of his wine-wetted tongue.
The bulkhead elicited a series of rhythmic clicks, then groaned open. A slave entered the office, tracing their usual route between velvet-backed chairs. They piled his plates of chewed-up gristle and bone onto their wiry forearms and fled back the way they'd come, all without suffering the weight of Calivan's stare a single time. He continued to sip from his cup, peering over its edge to scan the lines of a letter, the subtle hum of a magelight lantern and the impatient tap of his foot filling the silence between sighs.
He paused, catching an unusual sound from the corridor beyond his office. He stared past his brow into the reinforced metal door, straining his ear to the distant groan of the Ossuary's joists. He heard only the usual distant din of the guards. When nothing more came, he resumed his reading.
A metallic twang and a muffled thud drew his attention back again. Sucking down the last of his red, Calivan rose from his desk—smoothed the material of his robe—and paced around its edge to get nearer to the door. His eyes remained pinned on it, envisioning the hallway outside, hair prickling as he felt a strange sense subsume him. Something was coming. He summoned his staff to one hand.
The dial-lock on the outside of the door twisted, whirring and clicking as it went, eking out the combination. Calivan relaxed. He set his staff onto the chair opposite the magefire hearth and went to open the bulkhead. Upon hauling it wide, he was met face-to-face with the standard guard's dress—a veil and a tri-point crown—and eyes glowing with an ethereal violet hue. An unnatural force pushed Calivan backwards and he fell, stumbling on the rug, as the guard's body collapsed bonelessly like a bundle of loose cloth.
A man climbed through the wide-open bulkhead, hiking his steps over the uniformed corpse between them. He was diminutive, clothed in rags, the outline of his knobby, emaciated shoulders casting harsh shadows. His skin was wet with blood and grease; he grasped a soldier's sabre in one hand. That violet light rushed out of the guard and back to him as if it were taking cover beneath his flesh. An unnatural, guttural sound rumbled in his throat once it found its place. It was a stubbled, weary countenance that Calivan had grown used to, creased nominally with malcontent, now illuminated by hearthfire.
"You know what I am here for." said the prisoner, voice coarse from disuse. The tip of his stolen sabre hovered at Calivan's chin.
Calivan's eyes flicked to the door. A demonic presence thickened the air and made his ears ring. "If you get out of here, what then?" he asked, fingers twitching. He glanced toward his stave. "Will you go home? Just to give her reason to slit your cousin's throat the moment you step one foot—" In the instant that Calivan's creeping hand shot out to summon his stave, a copper-capped pommel struck his temple. He felt his body rebound against the hard stone of the floor, consciousness a tenuous influence over his limbs, his awareness swiftly fading.
Groggy, wracked by skull-splitting pain, Calivan climbed onto his knees, fingers digging into the silk upholstery of a sitting chair. His office was cloaked by darkness. Thunderous footsteps wavered in and out of his attention, washing like waves on a shore, melding with the groan of the prison's iron skeleton. He patted himself down, face blanching, neck flashing hot. His key—gone.
He pushed himself to his feet and stumbled to the exit, tripping over the edge of a chaise in the process. The guard's limp body was a doorstop for him to lunge around. He felt his way down the hall; as he drew nearer to the sound of busy footfalls, magelight soaked his stinging eyes. More guards ran this way and that, barking at each other; some carried their bloody-headed comrades on one arm, others dragged the corpses of beaten prisoners to a pile. From what Calivan could see of the branching expanse of the Ossuary, its cells all lay wide open.
"Calivan! Sir!" A tight-fingered tug on his shoulder made him whip his head around just to bat it away. Remigius, in his novice robes, fastened his fists tight into his overcoat. "There's been a breakout! The men are trying to contain it—"
"—Is she here?" Calivan asked, the words seething out through grit teeth. He grasped the novice's arms.
"No, sir. She's still in Vyrantium." Remigius replied, face knit tight from the quarrel surrounding them, his fellow soldiers rushing to count their cell keys again. When Calivan's expression smoothed out under the wipe of his gloved hand, Remigius lowered his voice. "Sir, what are we to do?"
Calivan brushed by, beckoning him with the quirk of a finger. They proceeded surreptitiously, with Remigius's wide-eyed glancing, down one of the branching hallways, far from the clamour of the guard. Their steps swallowed up by the steady rumble of the steam-pumps at the heart of the compound; its many pipes sprawled the walls and ceiling in a vascular maze, glowing dully with enchantments that lit their quick-paced journey in green. Beyond a gilded set of doors sat a mammoth machine: a grunting, groaning thing at the centre of a ceaseless pump complex; its veins of lyrium and copper rose far above their heads to form a canopy of interlocking vessels.
"Grab those charges." said Calivan, gesturing for a set of metal-encased barrels. He did not check to ensure the novice had gotten to work before he was rifling through a pile of old lyrium cores twice his size.
The handle on the top of the outermost charge was too oversized for both of Remigius's hands; he threw himself counter to its weight and dragged it, with an ear-aching scrape, toward the pump system. "He couldn't have gotten far." said Remigius, itchy enough from the looming presence of the Machine to fill the silence. "If the pressure doesn't kill him, the distance to the surface will." when Calivan did not respond, Remigius took it upon himself to chime back in with a quiet "Yes, surely."
Remigius only looked in his superior's direction once he had finished dragging a second charge before the pump system. By then, Calivan had retrieved a large, flat thing, like a canvas, to prop up against the rest of the charges. He unwound the ratty cord holding a loose dust-cloth over it and pulled the fabric free. Remigius was startled to see himself suddenly in a grubby, uneven reflection; his countenance was a smudge of taupe admidst green-silver texturing, like he was looking into one large piece of metal—once polished—that had since tarnished. The edges of the mirror were uneven, as if it had been rent free from some wall and stashed away amongst their junk.
Adjoined to the pump control was the hypocaust; its fires licked through the gaps of a grate like a whispering tongue through grit teeth. When Calivan cast a swift spell to dismiss its enchantments, it began to groan against the force of the combustion. He gestured for Remigius again. "Get the charge in there." he ordered. Again, without a second look, he returned to the tarnished mirror. He withdrew a charm from an inner pocket of his robes and traced its framed perimeter.
Remigius faltered, watching as the mirror's surface began to glow. A single, sharp glance from his superior sent him to work. With a set of cast iron tongs, he hauled the hypocaust's door wide open. He dragged the lyrium charge in front of the gap, the stink of burning waste and the chalky texture of mana-induced inferno catching on his every inhale. His cheeks and eyes stung; the heat of the hypocaust crept out, laving over him, making the metal buttons of his jacket nip his skin. With the impetus of a spellcast, the lyrium-imbued barrel walked itself into the furnace. He force the door shut again and turned once more to Calivan.
The mirror's surfaced warbled, translucent and shimmering like mid-afternoon sunlight on the sea. Remigius found himself transfixed by the sight, numb to the feeling of heat clawing at his skin.
"I would say it's been a pleasure serving with you." said Calivan, shrugging out of his overcoat. Remigius snapped to attention. The furnace's flames licked at the grate, seeping ever further beyond its control. The hinges of its door groaned under the strain, punctuated with a resonating, metallic thud. "But there's no time for that."
A formality caught on Remigius's tongue; as Calivan stepped through the surface of the mirror, all that crossed his lips was a hasty "wait!"
"Praise Dumat." Calivan said, tossing the words over a shoulder like any other farewell. Remigius's grasp grazed his shoulder as he stepped free of the furnace's oppressive heat.
The mirror's cast dissipated; a mute thump accompanied Calivan's first few steps onto fine oak floors. A disembodied hand lay at the base of the mirror, too stunned even to bleed.
At some distance from the blast that rocked the sea floor, where bits of iron viscera plunged in all directions, a man—far from the Ossuary's last—washed up on shore. He crawled on his hands and knees, vomiting up a mix of saltwater, sand, and gruel. His vision flickered, overcome by the sudden onslaught of sunlight. A single, gasping inhale shuddered through his lungs. Then, skin stinging from the cold, back warmed by the mid-afternoon heat, he collapsed.
He awoke with a sharp inhale. The world was darker than it had been; warmer, softer, with a woodfire-smoke scent and the taste of bile on his tongue. He commanded himself to sit up, but the weight of a blanket cast over his supine form was too encumbering. He barely managed to groan.
The sound of slow-moving footsteps shocked him into awareness and elicited another frightened gasp for air. He choked on the instinct, but found himself too exhausted to cough: the resulting sound was a horrible, wet-chested hack that ended with a wheeze and something like a whimper. When that slow-footed silhouette appeared at his bedside, he worked himself up into a blind panic, mind a misty soup of basest fear and apprehension. When a cool hand lay against his forehead, his body lost its fight, and he slumped into his itchy pillow.
"Speak, lad." a gravelly voice urged him. When another groan met his grit teeth, it, too, became a wearying cough and another strained wheeze. "Nevermind, nevermind. Don't try." The hand left his forehead. His arms lay limp at his sides, but twitched to reach out for the contact all the same.
The stranger left his bedside, just as slow as before. He wavered in and out of consciousness, dizzied by the shifting shapes of firelit shadows on the wall. He made out a shelf full of old tomes and a few tools he could identify with time; harpoons, rope, a hammer. His eyes slid shut.
The stranger returned, though he had no concept of the time that had passed. A wooden clinking sounded beside his head and startled him from his sleeping. A bowl of soup found a place at his bedside table, murky and pallid yellow, surface subsumed by steam and glistening blobs of melted fat.
"Bones for bones, eh?" said the stranger. He squinted up at their silhouette, but could make out only overgrown silver hair, the glint of a balding head, and the creases of a wind-weathered face. A knobby hand grasped his shoulder and tugged at the material of a rough-woven shirt he couldn't remember wearing. "Sit up, sit up."
With some concerted effort, he managed to shift his legs against the mattress. His hands pressed down beside his hips, straining at the elbows and the shoulders, until he was mostly vertical. The moment he ceased his pushing, his limbs went weak again. No matter: the stranger leaned over him, spoonful of soup in hand, and brought it to his lips. It tasted like little more than the sea, which was an unpleasant reminder for his ravaged stomach. He ground a piece of softened kelp between his molars and barely summoned the energy it took to swallow. He let his head lean back into the wall.
"I found you washed up on the beach." said the stranger. "A full moon in the middle of the day, naked as a babe. It gave me a start." Another spoonful of soup warmed his lips. A sense of calming reassurance made his eyes droop. "Long as you don't meet her Holiness in my bed, you're a welcome guest." A sudden weight went thump! on his leg. The stranger's voice changed, as if chiding a child. "Gentle, Masha. He's in a right state."
He spied a tabby cat climbing over his blanket-covered legs. Between the intermittent shifting of the animal on his lap and the mostly-finished bowl of soup warming his stomach, he found sleep fast approaching. The sound of the stranger rising to their feet, and of the wooden utensil scraping against the bowl, faded into the quiet obscurity of his unconscious mind.
A hiss and a sudden, sharp slash to his hand shook him from a state of absent-mindedness. The same tabby cat that had been curled up on his lap wriggled and bared her teeth to get away from his too-tight grip, a white-knuckled squeeze that had not been of his own volition; he released her instantly and she went scurrying far away. He felt a demonic presence peel back behind the layer of his consciousness, grumbling like a feral animal.
He managed to move his arms, then his legs; his disoriented, fear-shot mind still reeled, far outpacing the sluggish motions of his frail body. His feet touched the floor, its hearth-warmed surface a foreign feeling. He pulled himself to stand after devoting some effort to the endeavour. Then, one step at a time, achingly slow, he approached the door which sat opposite the hearth. Its brass knob was cool against his roughened palm.
The door swung open and wrenched itself from his grip the moment its latch fell free. It rebounded against the outer wall of the building, the loud clack! of wood on stone lost to the violent wail of the wind, the lashing of waves onto the rocks below, the trickle as that seawater calmed on the crags and slithered back home again. He stepped out of the hearth's reach, feet wetted by the misting of seawater and rain, his hair whipped in all directions. With one weary hand keeping the strands from his eyes, he peered out into the cloudy sky, sucking down gasps of air to fill his lungs, and saw the gauzy glow of the moon for the first time.
A tall wave cracked against the shoreline, splattering him with thick, heavy droplets, lashing his arms, soaking his borrowed clothing, intruding on his parted lips and sweat-sticky skin. The air was cold, flinching inside his chest, working up a cough out of a spasm.
"Are you mad? I'm too old to go out chasing you down!" Called the stranger, a darkened silhouette in the doorway, shouting over the clamour of waves. "Get back in here!"
He ran his hands over his face, swiping the seawater away, chapped lips stinging from the salt. He ambled back toward the light of the door, the lighthouse looming large, its peak illuminated like the oncoming sunrise.
The door shut behind him and the world seemed to relax with a sigh. He brushed his rain-damp hair back from his face and wrapped himself up in the blanket the stranger extended out to him. A cup of tea awaited him on the measly table for one, at which he came to sit. The stranger pulled up the stool from the hearthside, where it had been perching at the cooking pot. Their knees bumped under the table, too crowded to do anything less.
"Seems you're doing better." said the stranger. He warmed his hands on his cup. "T' tell you the truth, I expected you to be gone by morning."
"There's still time." he replied, his voice strange to his own ears. He watched the stranger's face shift, surprise and then recognition, curiosity then apprehension. He could see the stranger properly, now: an overgrown beard hanging from a wiry, wind-creased face, eyes alight—lighthouse keepers were often odd, zealous people, he'd heard—and fixed on knobby knuckles.
"You got a name?" asked the stranger, the phrase coming loaded with several more questions too weary to form: an Antivan? How did you end up here? What happened to you?
"Lucanis." he answered. Hearing it aloud made his nerves pique.
The stranger nodded, twisting his cup against the tabletop, its ceramic feet scraping. His attention averted to a shifty shadow in the corner—he rubbed his thumb and fingers together, clicked his tongue, tried to summon it closer; alas, Masha was determined to hide away.
"She's a good judge of character." he said. "Most of the time." He eyed Lucanis more carefully, fingers tapping on the edge of his cup; then, he leaned back, folding his arms over his chest. "You ever kill anyone, lad?"
Lucanis sipped his tea. It tasted of little more than hot water. He averted his eyes to his cup and sat through the tension in the air with little more to offer than a returned question: "Why do you ask?"
"Long way from Denerim, this." said the stranger. He returned to twisting his cup side to side, one arm still slung over the back of his seat. "The Templars wanted me. Didn't have the stomach for it. Now we're here." He narrowed his eyes, unpicking the unconvincing facade Lucanis was putting on. "And I won't let anyone drag me into nothin', neither." He leaned onto the table, peering closer. "You're welcome under my roof without any quarrel, Andraste as my witness, as long as you're no killer." He watched Lucanis take another silent sip of tea and refrain from answering. "You've got her blessing already, I reckon, the way you've healed."
There was an unspoken expectation that lingered in the air between them. Lucanis would be gone by morning, they both knew.
Lucanis stood from his seat with some effort. He lingered for a moment, bowed his head, and spoke in a quiet tone: "Thank you for your kindness." With little else to give, he returned to his borrowed bed, and lay awake long past the sound of the stranger settling in for sleep on the bench at the other end of the floor.
As the hearthfire died, bathing him in darkness and the distant rattling of the wind, Lucanis fought to keep his heavy eyes closed. Spite rumbled, creeping his way along the length of his spine, basking in the silence, perking up at every creak of the building. Was it them? Had they been found? No way to know. Not yet.