#anyway! every time I am made to think about this I redouble my resolve to spread love and positivity about this subject!

[carolinanadeau]

I have talked about my self-destructive bad habits before but one of them I am coming dangerously close to right now is, idk, this need to be too thorough and thus risking exposing myself to whatever Upsetting Content I Vowed Never to Read Again in my efforts to avoid it.

like there is a small part of me telling the rest of me, "you should go into the notes of that post that makes you so upset and see who reblogged it so you don't ever interact with them! you should check who's in the likes so you can be assured none of them are people you like and then feel outraged and upset about it if you find one of them in there!"

like what is this supposed to do? what does this achieve? I won't follow anybody if I find the filtered post on their blog, but I'm not going to go out of my way to mine through the depths of hell (that post) to preemptively find out more information to upset me, you know? no clicking on it. no looking at it. as far as I'm concerned it already doesn't exist except on the unfortunate occasions where it does, for a few moments, as a filtered post or that stupid fucking image showing up on Google.

[kaoruyogi]

How to Win Wars and Influence Nobles (Ch. 18)

Rating: E for Explicit/NSFW Content!

Check it out on AO3!

You’d think a video game lawyer could just drop into a pseudo-medieval universe filled with magic and demons and be totally okay with it, right?

Nah.

In the wake of her brother, Spencer’s, disappearance, Belle dropped into Thedas with luggage, but without a clue. After a brief but memorable panic attack, she resolved to be the best goddamn lawyer Thedas had ever seen. Even if she was the only goddamn lawyer Thedas had ever seen. And even if that obstinate asshole, Cullen, wouldn’t stop giving her the side-eye every time she walked into a room…Or every time he walked into a room with her in it…Or every time they walked into a room together…Or–Fuck it. You get it.

Chapter 18: The Blood of the Wicked

Hauling Samson from the Arbor Wilds to Skyhold was proving more problematic than Cullen had anticipated. The first problem was the limited cadre that would allow them to travel fast enough to get to Skyhold before any of Samson’s information became useless to the Inquisition. Due to their diminutive ranks, the soldiers alternated watch and guard shifts with the members of the inner circle who had not gone into the Temple of Mythal with Max. Not only was it a logistical complication, but Cullen was constantly forced to intervene when Sera decided she was going to kill Samson after he ran his mouth during her guard rotation.

And Samson did run his mouth. That was the second problem. It was all too likely that the man sought to get himself killed by one person or another before reaching Skyhold where his knowledge of Corypheus’s plans would be plucked from his skull by whatever means Max deemed appropriate. Samson pecked and gnawed at everyone around him, and was spat on an punched more than once for his efforts.

He focused particular attention on Cullen. Samson knew Cullen could hear the red lyrium running in his addled and glowing veins. Samson knew it sang to Cullen in tones that were less dulcet and inviting than they were cloying and demanding. Samson knew Cullen had stopped taking any lyrium altogether. Samson knew too much, and it took every ounce of patience Cullen had not to engage him. Samson’s presence exacerbated Cullen’s withdrawal symptoms. This made that every ounce of patience that much harder to muster. Had Cullen been in the earlier phases of his withdrawal, he might have punched Samson, might have killed him for all he had done. Had he been in the earlier phases of his withdrawal, he might have killed Samson just to suck the lyrium from his marrow. It was a notion that plagued him day and night.

Samson’s harassment doubled when he realized Belle was Cullen’s romantic partner. Samson leered and made obscene gestures and catcalled her. Much of the time she seemed too lost in her own mind to notice. She would stare at nothing, unblinking as they rode and as they ate and as they dressed and as they undressed. She would find her way back to Cullen when he touched her, and she would smile as if nothing at all were amiss. She would laugh if someone said something humorous, and she would engage in conversation to add her perspective, often redoubling the laughter in the air. To the casual observer, Belle was relaxed and normal, jovial and unabashed as ever.

Cullen was not a casual observer. He had held Belle under his magnified scrutiny since the day she fell into Thedas. He noted the way her brow furrowed and her jaw canted after she laughed from time to time, pensive as she chewed the tip of her tongue between her back teeth. The frequency of her sighs after she spoke had increased from her standard brief periods of agitation. Her hands had ceased their fidgeting, instead floating about her face to rub her eyes beneath her glasses. She stirred more in the night, her sleep restless and fragmented.

His attentiveness to her subtle shift in behavior drew his eyes away from Samson more than he should have allowed. On their second to last night on the road, Cullen watched Belle smile while Josephine told a story he could not hear next to a campfire he could not feel. It was his time to guard Samson, which drew him away from the pleasant dinner he might otherwise have been enjoying with Belle and the other advisors and members of Max’s inner circle. Samson had to be kept away for the sake of everyone’s sanity, they had all decided.

“You don’t deserve her, you know,” said Samson, leaning in close enough that Cullen could smell the ancient rot in the man’s mouth.

“There are very few things on which I would find myself inclined to agree with you. But, in this case, you are correct. I don’t deserve her.”

“You don’t deserve any of it.”

“Right again.” Cullen was loath to continue his concessions. He was loath to continue this conversation. Every time Samson opened his mouth, Cullen’s nausea grew. The scent of dead teeth and dying organs wafted out on Samson’s breath, mingling with the screeching song of the red lyrium that seemed to grow louder in an attempt to drown out his words.

“I was a better man than you, Rutherford. I am a better man than you.”

“For a time, you were a better man than me, but I did not poison and kill hundreds of Templars and bind them to a darkspawn magister simply because I was disillusioned with the Chantry and addicted to lyrium I could not obtain by other means.”

“No. You burned mages souls from their bodies, instead. You followed the Chantry like a blind, dumb dog. You enjoyed the hateful shit they fed you. You gobbled it down. Even after you claim to have turned your back on the Chantry, you stayed their dog. Helping Hawke stop Meredith and leaving the Order didn’t change a thing. You joined the Chantry’s Inquisition so you could keep mages locked up forever. That you travel with them and that you work for one of them must really twist your guts.” Samson’s voice had an edge and a viscosity to it. Every word he spoke was like a venomous and creeping ooze. The chains around his wrist jangled with his every weak gesture.

Cullen turned to look Samson in his jaundiced red and blue eyes. “I will not continue to argue with you about the quality of our characters. My reasons for joining the Inquisition had nothing to do with locking up mages. I sought to stop a war I helped start. One that threatened to destroy Thedas. You have chosen the wrong side, Raleigh, and you took good men and women down with you. I am proud of my work with the Inquisition, and I am proud to call the Inquisitor—a mage, as you so thoughtfully mentioned—my friend.”

“Hey.” Belle’s voice rang like a soft chime from nearby. Cullen turned to see her approaching with Sera by her side. The campfire behind the women made Belle’s long curls glow around her shadowed face like the sun eclipsed by a moon. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that she wore a strange kind of smirk that pinched the left side of her face together, marking the equal measures of her concern and amusement. “Don’t feed the trolls.”

She came close enough to put her cool hand on the back of Cullen’s neck. Sera stayed a bit further away, squinting at Samson with her arms crossed. Belle’s fingers pressed and massaged Cullen’s tightened muscles, and he felt his fists relax until they were hands once more. “I just wanted to let you know I’m headed to bed. I know you have a couple hours left on douche duty.” Cullen nodded.

“I bet your cunt tastes like cherries,” said Samson. Cullen’s hands became fists again.

Belle’s eyebrows lifted and she shook her head. “And I bet your dick tastes like a dead man’s toe cheese, but some questions will just never be answered.”

Samson let out a dark chuckle. He must have been quite committed to dying before reaching Skyhold. In all the time Cullen had known him, and in everything he’d ever heard about him, Raleigh Samson had never been a lecherous or prurient man. Despite his blatant self-interest when it came to his lyrium addiction, he was not the kind of man to hound women. Before he had been removed from the Order, he had always been respectful toward women, mage and Templar alike. Even as they removed him from the Temple of Mythal, several women lay among the dead and defeated Red Templars around him.

“Anyway,” said Belle, “I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in a bit.” She left a brief kiss on Cullen’s forehead before walking away. Cullen watched her hips sway as she went. Her waving curls had grown down to the inward curve of her back, and her longer hair swung the opposite direction of her hips, like a pendulum.

Sera stayed behind, arms still crossed over her chest. She jerked her head toward the campfire. “I need to talk to you, Commander Fuzzy Shoulders.” Samson snorted, and Cullen looked from Sera to Samson and back. He could not leave their prisoner in favor of a private conversation. She sighed. “Right, you listen, Crotch Rot.”

“I’m all ears.” Samson’s sneer was audible.

“No horses near you. Nothing ‘round for a hundred miles. Try anything stupid, we catch you. And you’ll get an arse full of arrows. Just your arse. Won’t kill you, but will hurt. Lots.”

Cullen watched as the sneer melted off Samson’s face like ice in the spring. He said nothing in answer, but it was clear that he understood. Cullen stood to step away with Sera. The two of them both stood with Samson in their periphery. He was a nebulous cloud of red and black and sickly flesh out of the corner of Cullen’s eye. “What is it?”

“You noticed Belle being all…droopy, yeah? She’s laughing and happy, but it doesn’t get in. Doesn’t get to her eyes.”

Sera’s observation left Cullen taken aback. “I have noticed, yes. I had not realized anyone else had.”

“Pfft.” The blonde elf rolled her eyes and her head in unison. “Course I noticed. Dorian too. Josie might, hard to tell. She’s good at playing her cards close. Leliana definitely. If Bull or Varric were here, they’d see.” Sera took a breath to squint at Samson again before continuing. “She won’t say what’s wrong. If I ask, she smiles and pretends right’s right. You’re her Cully-Wully. She’ll tell you what’s got her all floppy when she thinks we’re not looking, yeah?”

“You know as well as I do that Belle cannot be made to do anything. I have two hours left on my guard shift, in any case, and she’ll be asleep by the time I can speak to her.”

“I’m taking over for the rest.” Sera tapped her foot in the tamped down grass beneath their camp. She reached into one of her pouches and withdrew a weathered and perforated sock. “Got a gag for Crotch Rot, so don’t worry about me killing him. More fun to aim for his arse if he does something stupid, anyway. You ever see a grown man with an arrow in his arse? Good for a laugh, that.”

Cullen’s stare was circumspect. He scanned Sera’s body language for signs of deceit or mischief and saw none. Her blue eyes, ever alight with a thousand simultaneous ideas, were at once clever and troubled. She held his gaze for as long as she could stand before rolling her eyes and her head in unison again. “Go on.” She clapped a hand on his arm and shoved him as hard as a person that much smaller could shove a person that much larger. He abided, listening to her soft footsteps and her sunny voice saying, “Open your mouth, Crotch Rot,” as he made his way toward the tent he shared with Belle.

She had her back to him when he entered, her long fingers plucking away at the laces on the back of her pale gray corset. The wings of her shoulder blades jutted out from beneath her dress that was gauzy and blue as the pre-morning sky. Were it not for the red curls draped over her shoulders and the harried manner in which she tugged at her corset, she would have looked to him as the skies over Honnleath while he fed his family’s livestock as a boy. She would have been the nimbus fog and the crisp, wet air that dampened the barley just so, the way the sheep and horses liked it best.

Cullen had not startled her. She peered over her shoulder and around her firestorm of loose curls, and he saw her eyes smile at him. “I should have known I would spend two hours futzing with this corset,” she said as she turned away. “Out of the seven fucking hundred million I have, I had to bring the one—” She held up her index finger, then brought it back down to the tangle over her spine. “—that doesn’t have clasps along the side.”

He tugged his hands free of his gloves, tossing the soft leather onto the table he installed every night in every one of his tents by sheer force of habit. As the cool evening air hit the sweat on his naked palms, he thought of how feckless that small table was with all its ungainliness and parts and pieces. Purposeless so much of the time. A waste of space.

Belle had managed to loosen the knot for the lower half of the corset, and had moved onto the upper knot. She spat out a fricative half syllable that might have been a curse when her finger was ensnared by the mess of cords. Cullen joined the fray, working faster in light of his clear view of the battlefield and its gangly soldiers. “Sera took over the rest of my watch.”

“That’s weird. You’re not worried she’s going to kill Samson?”

“She brought a sock.”

Belle’s responding laugh was like a spring. It had a bouncy quality to it that very nearly made Cullen forget the reason Sera had relieved him. The fabric of Belle’s corset sighed open when he loosened the final knot. “Ahh, thank you. I could feel the bones digging into my ribcage. Riding in a corset sucks a bag of dicks. I should have brought better clothes.”

Cullen doffed his mantle, speaking as he unfastened his pauldrons from his cuirass and his cuirass from his breastplate. “Sera is worried about you.”

Belle still had her back to him. She slid the corset down past her hips, stepping out of it and setting it on the table beside his gloves. Her bare toes flexed in the grass beneath their feet. “Why’s that?”

“I have been worried, too,” said Cullen. Belle slipped out of her breeches, finally turning to help him with his breastplate. Her lips pursed and moved to the left side of her face. “You have not been yourself since we left the Arbor Wilds.”

“Oh? And who have I been?”

“Maker’s breath. Please don’t be glib.”

“Then you don’t be precious. Tell me what you mean.” She took his breastplate from his chest while he held the backplate.

“You have been…pensive.”

“I’m usually pensive.” Belle turned away again. She pulled her dress up over her head, revealing her shimmering scar and a myriad of red indentations from her ribs to her hips. She ran a finger up one of the painful-looking marks and hummed out her displeasure. Her nightdress covered everything in short order. “I think a lot. For example, right now I’m thinking about what you’re trying to ask me. But you’re being oblique and it’s making deciphering your meaning difficult.”

Cullen crossed their tent in one stride. He spun to sit on the bed so he could look her in the eye. “Please don’t be so evasive.”

“I’m not being evasive.”

“You are. You have been distant and silent at the oddest moments. You’re being combative with me, and I’m only trying to figure out how I help you feel better.”

Belle sighed through her nose and leveled her gaze with his. “I’m fine. That’s what’s bothering me. Okay? I fucking killed a guy. A guy was alive and now he’s not, and I have absolutely no qualms with that.” Her voice wound itself tighter and tighter. “I’m just one hundred percent fine with the fact that guy is dead. I’m really fucking struggling with that. Like, does that make me a stone cold killer? Am I just…” She threw her hands up and shook her head. Her eyes went wider and wider. “Like, am I just totally cool with killing whoever now? Am I evil now because I don’t care that that douchecanoe is dead? Am I going to Hell? Is there a Hell here? It’s a lot to process. I get quiet when I’m processing. So, yeah, I’m fine, and it’s freaking me the fuck out.” She became more and more animated right up until her mouth clapped shut. She sat down beside him with a thud. Her head came to rest on his shoulder. “And now I’m getting even more confirmation that I’m a terrible person because I snapped at you for asking me what was wrong.”

Cullen looked down at her. The pin straight part in her hair was all he could see. “You are not a terrible person,” he said. She looked up at him, her neck contorted in a way that must have been uncomfortable. “You’ve given your good nature away simply by asking these questions of yourself.”

“I tried telling myself that. I can’t convince myself to believe me.”

“Can you convince yourself to believe me, then?” He ran his hand from her alabaster part to her alabaster chin. He let his fingers splay over her crooked neck. “I have known every type of person. Some days, I’m certain I have been every type of person. An unscrupulous killer, while she might not concern herself with the fact that she had taken a life, would also not concern herself with the morality of her actions. She would not have to find a way to justify it to herself because she would not give the virtue of her reasons a moment’s thought. The killing would be right to her simply because she had done it.”

“Well, that’s a whole lot of circular reasoning.”

Cullen twisted at his waist, holding Belle’s face in his hands. “Precisely. And you are not a woman who indulges in circular reasoning.” He knew she hated circular reasoning. She’d once ranted about it for fifteen minutes after a meeting with a very self-indulgent Bann.

Belle puffed out a laugh. “Uh uh.”

“We can then surmise—” He kissed her left cheek. “—that because you ask yourself these questions, and do not engage in circular reasoning—” He kissed her right cheek. Her nose scrunched up when she giggled. “—you are not an unscrupulous killer, correct?”

She beamed at him, and the heart she made beat for her warmed in his chest. “Have I ever told you that you’d have made a great attorney?”

“I don’t believe you have.”

“Well, you would’ve. Except the kissing. Can’t go all kissing on your clients and your jurors and shit. That’s fraternization. It’s frowned upon.” Belle’s moon face always looked so small in his hands.

“I suppose I should be happy that you’re not one of my clients or jurors, then?” Cullen kissed her smiling lips. A brief thing, like a punctuation mark.

“I suppose you should.” She dropped her forehead against his chest. “I concede. I’m not an unscrupulous killer. That’s not going to stop me from dwelling on it for another tiny eternity, mind you. But I’m really tired, my spine has turned to gel-oh, and my ribs feel like they’re going to cave in.”

Cullen focused his hearing outside their tent. Several soldiers chuckled and whispered around the nearby fire. Night birds and insects chirped far from the circle of tents and carts. Sera was not murdering Samson inasmuch as she was talking mindlessly at him. Knowing her, she was simply trying to yammer him into submission. Talk him to death.

Gently, Cullen laid Belle down on their cot, taking his place beside her in the manner he determined least likely to jostle her tired body. Her back was flush to his chest, her head resting on her pillow and his bicep. From where he lay, he could just make out her eyes. He watched them blink and roll lazily in every direction before they closed. Her breathing was deep and even the moment her lashes grazed her cheek.

Cullen’s eyes remained open for a time. His mind remained active. His ears remained vigilant. He could not name the moment he fell asleep, though he would later recall drifting off to the sound of Sera mulling over the intricacies of raisin use in cookies.

*****

Cullen may have given the appearance that he was working when the guards brought Samson into his office. He had certainly been attempting to work. Knowing that he was expected to extract information from his former cohort—the man with whom he had once shared a room—made the words on the reports before him impossible to decipher. It was one thing to ask Cullen to capture and transport Samson. It was something else entirely to ask him to rekindle an obliterated relationship under the misbegotten pretense of mutual civility and humanity. Samson had been correct during Max’s judgement. Cullen did not believe there was anything worthy left in the man.

The former Templar and former Red Templar both had their heads down when the door opened. They looked up simultaneously, each catching flashes of contempt in the other’s eyes. This would be no easy task. Samson was unchained, though he was flanked by two rather large Inquisition soldiers. He squared his shoulders before walking through the door. The soldiers saluted and closed it behind him.

“Cullen.”

“Raleigh.” Cullen stood at the curt greeting. The first way he could think to remind Samson of his humanity was to remind him of his given name. He told Max that he was willing to give the Inquisition his knowledge, but from one look at him in this moment, Cullen doubted whether that would happen. “Are your quarters sufficient?”

Samson took another step forward as Cullen rounded his desk. “Better than a jail cell. Not by much.” He shrugged toward the door.

“Surely you can understand why we need to keep you under guard until—”

“Until you’ve got everything you can get out of me.”

“Until we can trust you,” said Cullen. “Once I can report back to the Inquisitor that you and I have built a good rapport, we will decrease the guard.”

“And how do you suppose that’s going to happen, Commander?” Samson stepped forward again. He had learned long ago that proximity an intimidation were among the best weapons at a Templar’s disposal, as had Cullen. Again, Cullen could smell the formidable reek of decay. “We never built much of one, even before I was cast out of the Order.”

Cullen stood firm, unyielding even as Samson loomed before him. The bedraggled man was two or three inches shorter than Cullen, but he continued to wield menace like a blade. He would have been ominous to someone who did not know him so well as Cullen once had. Samson’s prolonged proximity did, however, set Cullen’s head and gut to spinning. It was all he could do not to back away to evade the wailing emanating from Samson’s blood.

The sound of a door opening might have startled them had they not been fighting a silent battle of stony stares. “Hey, Cullen, how many sol—Oh.” On the boundaries of Cullen’s vision, he saw a mass of red hair and ivory skin that could only have been Belle. “I didn’t realize you were…doing this right now. I’ll come back in a bit.”

Samson broke his gaze, turning to look at Belle. “My lady.” There was a slowness to the way he said it. A thickness. A sludge. He pivoted to aim an exaggerated bow at her. “The Commander and I were just getting started.”

Cullen’s eyes flicked to Belle, who stood expressionless just inside the doorframe. The natural downturn of her mouth gave her a sternness that perpetually walked the line between anger and annoyance. She glanced at Cullen before fixing her glare on Samson.

Samson took her silence as invitation to continue. “I was just about to ask the Commander what he already knows about Red Templars. Perhaps I should ask you, my lady. What do you know about Red Templars?”

“Enough.”

“Is that so? I wonder, what constitutes ‘enough?’ For instance, did you know that ordinary lyrium is essentially a poison that Templars build a tolerance to?”

“As so many narcotics are.” Cullen could hear Belle let out a slow sigh through her nose. “I also know that red lyrium is worse, before you feel the urge to ask me about that, too.”

“And did you know that red lyrium attacks the blue stuff? Tries to destroy it in order to replace it?” Belle remained silent. “You didn’t know that, eh? It’s like a sickness destroying another sickness. It burns up the lyrium in your blood. Boils it till it’s gone.”

“Sounds painful.”

“Oh, it’s excruciating. If a Templar gets it on his skin before he has his first philter, it’ll try and burn right through to get at the blue stuff. Would you like a demonstration?”

In an instant, Samson reeled back and spat in Cullen’s face. In an instant, the bridge of Cullen’s nose and the top of his cheek were set aflame. In an instant, Cullen cried out his agony. He moved quickly, using his sleeve to wipe the tainted blood and saliva from his skin.

“Hey!” was bellowed from where Belle stood. Where she no longer stood. She appeared through Cullen’s blurred vision as fire and ice carried toward him on the wind. But she was not coming for him. She grunted as she swung her crooked arm at Samson’s face. The bony blade of her lightly clothed elbow connected with his nose, and it was his turn to cry out in pain as fresh blood poured from within and without. She rocked back, fist poised to strike the bleeding man again.

Cullen snatched her up before she could swing. His arm wrapped around her waist, and he tugged her back. Her feet lifted off the floor. Her whole body lurched and flailed. He worried for a moment that she might escape his grasp.

“I’m gonna fuck you the fuck up! Piece of fucking shit!” Belle’s leg swung out, narrowly missing Samson’s head. She spat at him while Cullen hauled her out of the open door. “Fuck you! Motherfucker!” The adjacent door opened to reveal the two guards just before Cullen shut himself out.

Belle groaned and hollered and thrashed until they reached her doorway. She began to fidget and ramble through her adrenaline surge the moment he set her down. “Fucking asshole. Are you okay? Holy shit. I actually connected. I didn’t think I would. I only ever went to that one Krav Maga class. But I watched a shitload of Muay Thai and Em-Em-Ay. Maybe that’s why. Are you okay?” She was all but vibrating.

Cullen’s anger bubbled deep in his chest. He held her arms to still her. “Why would you do something so reckless?”

“Reckless? I’m fine. It’s okay, he wasn’t going to hurt me.”

“You might have destroyed any chance I have at getting information about Corypheus’s plans. Why would you let him provoke you like that? Why would you hit him?”

“What? I might what?” Belle’s brow furrowed in confusion and in fury. “He attacked you! He hurt you! So I hurt him back! He knows the fucking score.”

The anger bubbling in Cullen’s chest rolled up and growled through his throat. “He was testing me! He was testing you! He is testing everything!” His voice left his lips loud and harsh. Her eyes that were like armor and like the sea went wide. “He wants his last chance to die fighting. The red lyrium is killing him. He wants to die before it can. I will not have you or anyone else giving him the idea that he is entitled to that kind of relief!”

Belle looked as though she wanted to hit him or scream at him or cry. She shrugged his hands from her arms. She turned and walked through her door, closing it behind her. He heard the door to the other side of the battlements open and close, and saw her march off toward the kitchen. Her head was down and her hands were clenched tight into furious fists.

With yet another reason to despise Samson tucked away his mind, Cullen re-entered his tower. Samson sat in a chair that had been dragged from beside the wall into the center of the room. Two large hands belonging to two large men rested on either of his shoulders. Cullen dismissed them, reassuring one of them that he would be fine and reminding the soldier not to question orders.

“She’s a spitfire, your Belle.” Samson chuckled that dark chuckle. His tongue darted out to stop the blood running out of his nostrils and over his lips and down his chin. He winced when he sniffed, and he chuckled again. A serrated cut over the bridge of his nose gushed more blood. Even the man’s blood looked viscous and heavy—too thick for human veins.

“An interesting choice of words.” Cullen perched himself on the edge of his desk. His hand found the pommel of his sword, and he was grounded by the cool metal and rough cord there. Has skin felt raw, but there was no need for a healer. The red lyrium in Samson’s blood had not been as concentrated as that of the Red Templar Cullen slew at the Shrine of Dumat.

“I can’t help but notice I’m still alive. Even after attacking the Commander of the Inquisition in his own quarters. Your lot must be desperate.”

“Not as desperate as you, apparently. Do you want to die so badly that you’re willing to throw away any chance at redemption?”

Samson scoffed. “There is no redemption for me. There’s only madness or the end of a blade. Both, if your Maker sees fit to cast me out in the most fitting way. The longer I wait to die, the more the red lyrium kills me. As I said on my knees before your Inquisitor, Corypheus could only delay my corruption.”

“And as I said, you were part of something larger than yourself once. Why did you become a Templar?”

“Same as you. I wanted to help people. Just not the same people as the Chantry wanted me to help.”

“Do you think you’re helping anyone right now? The bulk of your Red Templars have been wiped out. The Templars left alive and untainted by red lyrium have nevertheless been tainted by your actions and by your leadership under Corypheus. Do you honestly believe that the mages would benefit in any way from his success?”

“I don’t believe anyone can benefit from anything happening in Thedas right now. The Chantry’s in chaos, looking for anyone they can blame for all of it. Templars have become just as hated and distrusted as mages. No one can seem to stop killing each other. At least Corypheus was able to unite Thedas, even if it meant uniting against him.”

“If he wins, everyone will be subjugated. As I recall, that was one of your—how did you put it—your ‘philosophical differences’ with the Order and the Chantry. If you help us defeat him, the Inquisition will have sway with the Chantry. We could have a say in the selection of the next Divine. The world can change, if you help us keep it alive. Men can find redemption. Perhaps even some of your own men.”

Samson went silent for what seemed like a lifetime. His head hung looser on his neck, much of his will to fight having fled his body. He was exhausted. Cullen understood that kind of exhaustion. It was the kind that left a man feeling less than a man after fighting for too long for a cause he knew she should not have supported. Cullen felt it in Kirkwall. Each night, he sat at the edge of his bed with his head hanging loose on his neck, his body protesting every move he’d made throughout the day, his mind praying for the clarity and the strength to understand and to do what was right. The weight of a thousand lives crushed him, as it crushed Samson now.

“Alright.” All the viscosity and sliminess had left Samson’s voice. All that remained was the same voice that had once asked Cullen about what it was like in Honnleath before the Blight. It was the same voice that had comforted mages and Templars on their worst days, and it was the same voice that decried the Order’s treatment of its charges. “What do you want to know?”

It was deep into the night when Cullen called the soldiers in to escort Samson back to his quarters. The former Templars made arrangements amongst themselves for the timing of their next meeting. Cullen made no promises of a merciful death to Samson, and Samson made no promises to remain alive until the madness ripped his mind from his will.

It was too late to approach Belle that night, and Cullen was still vexed at her rashness. He wished he had not shouted at her and he wished he had shouted louder. He had been unable to compose himself enough to find the words to make her understand. He resolved to find those words before he slept as he ascended the godforsaken ladder into his loft. He could no longer think of the word “ladder” without his mind adding “godforsaken” in Belle’s voice.

His ire faded as he lay over the blankets on his still tidy bed. It faded into gentle sorrow at his inability to hold her close and murmur his explanations and apologies into her hair. He would speak with her the next day, though it may very well have been the next day by the time his eyes drifted shut. The Fade was cruel and unmerciful when it finally took him, and in his nightmares his own cruelty was reflected on the backs of his eyelids.

The blood of the wicked would always flow through his veins, refusing to be forgotten, refusing to release him, refusing to allow him to be a better man.

*****