#middle is the small window of time between her blinding herself and the apocalypse starting

[haemosexuality]

wwait i never posted this. my wife <3

[masalvas-girl]

𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙠𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝘿𝙖𝙮 (𝙥𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙄𝙄𝙄)

You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. Hope you like this! Tell me if you want a fourth part please. 

➷➹➷➹➷➹➷➹➷➹➷➹➷➹➷➹➷➹➷➹➷➹➷➹

𝓔𝓿𝓮𝓻 𝓼𝓲𝓷𝓬𝓮 𝓶𝔂 𝓫𝓪𝓫𝔂 𝔀𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓪𝔀𝓪𝔂, 𝓲𝓽'𝓼 𝓫𝓮𝓮𝓷 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓫𝓵𝓪𝓬𝓴𝓮𝓼𝓽 𝓭𝓪𝔂

     It was a rainy night. Juliet could hear the gentle whisper of rain hitting the window. Carlos was lying down awake beside her, and oh god, she was exhausted. Juliet was looking at the ceiling, lost in her own thoughts, when she felt his hand caress her right naked thigh. She turned to see him and moved a little bit towards him, just to rest her head and part of her chest on his. Hearing the smooth beat of his heart was her favorite thing to do after, well, after having a long session of cardio with him. Carlos had always been a very generous lover, and that night was no exception. He fucked her like no one else had before.

     —I love you. Did you know that? —the sound of his serene voice and the rain mixed together like a song. These were the moments she loved the most, when they shared their intimacy without any external pressures or awkward interruptions. Sometimes, it seemed like his boss and work mates adored ruining certain moments.    

     —I was just starting to suspect it —he rolled his eyes even though they weren´t looking at eachother and laughed. Juliet laughed too, and started playing with his chest hair, which was located on his well-defined pectoral area, and also on the inferior part of his bellybutton, a.k.a ¨happy trail¨. Juliet loved it. A fine coat of sweat covered his skin making it glisten under the light of that old yellow bulb. She couldn´t be more in love—. Joking! You know I love you too�� a lot —she turned her head and looked intensely at his dark eyes while she lowered her hand slowly, touching every part his body which looked like it belonged to a Greek God. All the time he had spent away exercising really paid off well.

      —God, you never get tired, do you? My little love-machine, you never let me rest —he placed a kiss on her lips that got more intense with every passing second. Carlos loved kissing her soft cherry-red lips, and she never complained about it. The young woman sat on him, just above his lower abdomen, and tied her long wavy dark hair on a high pigtail.          

     —It´s your fault for being so damn handsome —she whispered to his ear and that was the final trigger for Carlos. He started tracing wet kisses all over her jaw, neck and collarbones. Little moans escaped her parted lips, and he nibbled against her hot skin.

    —I should go grab a condom before this gets worse, I left 'em in the bathroom —Juliet let out a quick chuckle, hearing the despair in his voice was a weird form of compliment. She got off Carlos and he got up quickly. The sight of his body only covered in a pair of black boxers was so delightful that she didn´t mind the interruption it represented.

     Everything was perfect and normal as usual, until he suddenly stopped and took a step back. Carlos´ hands started trembling and he staggered. He turned around to see Juliet from the foot of the bed. At first she thought he was joking, but out of the blue he coughed up a serious amount of blood. His skin started turning to a grey, dead-like color. He let himself drop violently to his knees, and Juliet got out of bed and ran towards him.

     —Carlos! What the fuck is going on?! —she repeated his name over and over again, but he didn´t seem to listen. He was now starting to look like a decayed corpse, and Juliet felt a paralyzing horror pumping through her veins. She touched his back, and he raised his head in her direction aggressively. His eyes appeared to be blind and with the animal snarl he gave, she noticed that now Carlos had really sharp teeth. Juliet´s legs failed her and she fell suddenly on her backside. He began crawling slowly towards her.

     —Take my gun —he said with difficulty between painful groans, as if he was fighting something inside him—… End this, please…

     Juliet reached frantically under the bed; she could feel her heartbeat rumbling in her ears and her body was turning cold with adrenaline. He was getting closer and when she thought it was too late, the feel of cold steel greeted her hand and she took it out. It was Carlos´ Pistol G18. She pointed it at him, grabbing the gun with both her trembling hands because of its weight, and from his left eye, a slow tear came out. She couldn´t do it. She lowered the gun, giving up all type of self-defense, and he jumped straight to her, losing any sense of humanity. She was incapable of shooting the man she loved.

     Everything turned black.

      𝓝𝓸𝔀 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝓱𝓮'𝓼 𝓰𝓸𝓷𝓮 𝓘 𝓬𝓪𝓷'𝓽 𝓯𝓮𝓮𝓵 𝓷𝓸𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓰...                 

     She woke up with a violent jolt the moment Carlos jumped up at her. It was just another stupid nightmare. Why did she keep dreaming about him though? Oh, of course… She missed him like hell, and those dreams that turned into nightmares were no strange to her anymore. Juliet felt heaviness inside of her every time she thought about him, and she was sick of having those dreams. She covered her face with her hands; trying to shake up the sensation that awful nightmare had given her.  

     She removed her hands and held them in the air in front of her face for a little bit. They were shaking just like in her dream, and she had some cuts in her palms that she didn´t remember. Juliet couldn´t tell whether it was day or night because of where she was. That fucking closet that was so small she barely fitted in it, but now, it was the safest place. Or at least that´s what she told herself. She stretched and turned on the light without having to stand up. The lights blinded her, and she squeezed her eyes. Once they got accustomed to the light, she took her vision to her leg. The little pool of blood was still there, but at least her leg wasn´t bleeding anymore. When she took away the fabric piece she had cut from an old t-shirt to serve as a bandage, she was able to inspect the damage that was done in her calf.

     The laceration had to be at least 2.75 inches long and it didn’t look too wide, but it had to get medical examination, which seemed a little impossible in the middle of fucking apocalypse. Juliet took that same t-shirt she had made the first bandage with, and repeated the process... Tying up that motherfucker was seriously painful, but it stopped the bleeding successfully. She had to bite down on the rest of the t-shirt that was left, and the woman frowned hard when the piece of fabric adhered to her open wound.   

     She lied down again on the hard ground, with her mind drifting away from reality. What was the point of going on? Her family was possibly dead already, and Carlos was way long gone. She closed her eyes, mentally and physically tired, but she was afraid of falling asleep and having another one of those dreams. Tears started flowing without control from her eyes. Why didn´t she warn everyone when she had the chance? She was scared of looking completely nuts to everybody like she did to Carlos. Now all of those deaths fell upon her shoulders. And she wasn’t strong enough to carry that weight.  

     Juliet looked at her right and she saw that her combat knife and Desert Eagle were still there. Daddy had taught her well on how to defend herself, and she proved it when Mrs. Jones had pounced on her, almost taking a big bite from her neck. Poor thing, ended up with her brains blown out. And Juliet still couldn´t process it. It felt like she was in one of her twisted nightmares, but no, sadly, that was Raccoon City´s reality. All thanks to Umbrella. Fuckers.

     She was starting to fall asleep again when she heard some distant noises inside her apartment, silent steps. Juliet opened her eyes wide, and her heart skipped a beat. She made sure she closed all the doors and the windows. Perhaps they were capable of opening doors too? If they were, it seemed that the smell of blood really attracted those monsters... 

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .   .   .    .

    It didn’t take long for Carlos to reach the building of apartments were Juliet used to live. So many thoughts and memories came to his mind when he located the phone booth which was at the counter corner of the building. Some months ago he would dial up Juliet´s phone number from that phone booth and look at her window just in case she peeked a look to the street. But that never happened. Now, that window was dark and it looked sinister and empty. The whole city looked like that. Dead.

    Entering the place wasn’t that complicated. The doors weren´t locked and all the zombies that had been wandering inside had already been killed, but he was still careful with every movement he made. Carlos took the elevator to the floor number five, and when he arrived he saw what was left of Juliet´s favorite neighbor resting against a wall. He felt nauseous, as he had known that old lady very well, and now he had seen her with her head blown off. The whole place was a bloodbath, and still, no sign of Juliet. He reached her door, which was locked with key. Luckily, he had his lock pick at a hand's reach. Carlos was skilled and it took him no time to open the white door.

      Inside, everything was just how he remembered it. The arrangements of furniture, the color of the walls, even the fucking hole in the wall of the hall he had made once by accident. The only thing that was missing was her. He took a step to get in, and instantly noticed he had stepped on something sticky. The dark-haired man lowered his head to check what it was, and he realized it was coagulated blood. Carlos started to get worried. What if she had been infected and now was walking around the apartment in the form of a cannibal zombie perfectly capable of hurting him? Or even worst, what if she was still in the process of converting? Carlos knew the virus could be awfully slow. He knew that if he found Juliet like that it would be so horribly painful and traumatic having to kill her. He even doubted he had the balls to do such thing. But it was too late, and he couldn’t leave just like that. Carlos tried to keep the hopes up of finding her alive and well.

        He followed the dark trace of blood that led him to her bedroom, and then, to her closet. He could taste the iron in his own mouth. He reached for the door knob, and twisted it ever so slowly. Once it was completely open, he swung the door open quickly. Carlos found her curled up in the farest corner of the small closet, pointing her gun with unstable hands at him. When they recognized eachother, they let out a loud relieve sigh at the same time. She dropped both her hands at her sides, and her face softened up. It looked like she had been crying. Juliet got up and walked the short distance that separated them. He noticed that the girl had a limp and an improvised bandage around her right calf. That could explain all the blood. Was it a bite?

     —Carlos! My God, you are alive! —She held him tight between her arms, so much that she almost choked him, and he never thought a simple embrace could feel so comforting.

     —Of course I am alive! I had to come and get you out of here —he left his gun drop to the ground and held her just as tight around her waist.

     —I told you to never come back —she stepped away after a long time of hugging, she started cleaning the tears of relief away from her face. He remembered how Juliet didn´t like it when people saw her crying. Not even in the middle of an apocalypse.

     —You know I'm real stubborn, honey.     

[dryad-of-the-dogwood]

Hey, so, uh... It's been almost 2 years and I'm the worst but I finally wrote a thing again. A Thread of Fate chapter 30, all posted on AO3 and everything, in fact. Maybe 2020 really is the apocalypse. Please forgive me and I hope it isn't a major disappointment after so long. 🖤

Chapter 30: Best Laid Plans

By the time Nalissa returned there was no emotion left on her face, and she declined to say where she had gone other than that we would hear news soon. Meanwhile, Zevran had managed to get the letter open both without breaking the seal and without poisoning himself, which was a pretty impressive feat to watch, not that I’d ever tell him that. Inside were only six words.

Clever girl.

But it’s your choice.

Below that, a bloody thumbprint was stamped in place of a signature.

Nalissa hasn’t let her guard slip even a little since then. She refuses to actually talk about Teyrn Cousland, but I’ve caught her more than once gripping her signet ring so hard it leaves an imprint of the crest on her palm. All day she was as tense as a drawn bowstring, and last night she refused to sleep, alternating between pacing the room with her daggers in hand and scribbling madly at something on the writing desk she wouldn’t let me see. Watching her push herself to exhaustion only reminds me of Ilana saying that was what she had done when she was most afraid, and it’s a thought that burns like the Joining mixture down my throat.

So I haven’t told her about the second attempt Zevran thwarted the next day. I can’t make myself deliver more news that will frighten her more than she is already. She’s punishing herself more than enough as it is, and knowing they’ve twice in two days managed to sneak traps for her into the keep would do nothing for her state of mind.

Even Caron has noticed. Today, when Nalissa nearly nodded off on her feet in the dining hall, he ordered her to take a day off from training the Wardens and get some rest. She found it offensive, of course—a sign he thought her weak. I just hoped it would help, because she did finally give up and pass out on the bed about an hour before midnight. But when she jolts awake so hard the bed shifts against the wall, I realize that was probably too much to hope for.

It’s still the middle of the night, so dark I can barely make out her silhouette against the faint light from the window. She’s sitting straight up, her hands behind her for support, and panting like she’s sprinted to get there. I recognize the posture well by now and I know better than to touch and startle her, no matter how much I want to hold her when she’s afraid. To my surprise, it’s her hands that start searching the bed instead until one of them finds my side. Once she’s found me, she presses her palm flat against my chest, and I expect her to push me away. Instead, she pauses for a heartbeat and then lets out a long breath before falling onto her back again.

It was exactly the span of a heartbeat that she waited, I realize as she covers her face with her other hand. That’s what her palm over my heart is about. She’s making sure I still have one.

“It’s okay,” I whisper, covering the hand still clutching my nightshirt with my own.

Nalissa lets her other hand fall from her face and turns her head toward me. I can’t see her expression in the dark with the only light behind her, so I have no idea what she’s thinking until she says softly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you, I just… needed to make sure you were okay.”

“Of course I am. You know, over a dozen people in my life have told me I’m entirely too oblivious to know when to die anyway.”

She hums softly at that, sounding thoughtful. “On a completely unrelated note, are they all dead already, or…?”

I laugh and squeeze her hand, and she leans up on one elbow toward me. Her hair tickles my face but she doesn’t close the distance completely, just hovers over me as if she can see me in the dark. My eyes adjust a little more slowly, but with her hair blocking the light from the window, I can finally read the worry in the set of her lips and eyebrows.

“You don’t have to be afraid for me,” I tell her quietly for what must be the hundredth time.

“There are assassins, Alistair.”

“Didn’t you say yourself they wouldn’t kill me?”

“They would have if you had opened that letter instead of me, wouldn’t they?” Nalissa asks pointedly, and well, I can’t argue with that. She parts her lips to speak again, then hesitates and places her free hand against the side of my face, running her thumb back and forth on my cheek and the short beard I still haven’t grown used to. Her voice falters a little as she finally says, “My love, there are far worse things they could do to you than kill you.”

I swear my heart swells at the endearment, but the rest of it… well, it just makes me sad. I think of the stories she’s told me that still make me feel sick to consider. I think of the scars across her back, the better healed ones on her forearms that she had to pay that blighted mage with her own suffering to close, of the way she shut down completely in that closet. And I think how all of it is so much worse because it’s her, and I’m helpless to change it, and I think I understand.

“That’s what you were dreaming, wasn’t it?” I ask, and she doesn’t answer but her expression tightens, and I know I’m right. “Hey,” I whisper, wrapping my arms around her waist to pull her closer. She settles onto my chest, but I can still feel the tension in her every muscle. “The only bad thing that’s going to happen to me is all the lectures I’m going to get from Eamon when we get back to Denerim.”

“Very funny.”

“It’s not funny, it’s true,” I counter, raising my eyebrows at her. “Have I been wrong yet? We’re both still here, safe and sound, just like I said. We’ve won every fight we’ve fought together, just like I said. You’ve fallen madly in love with me, just like I said…”

That gets a tiny laugh out of her, the first one I’ve heard since the letter arrived. Her smile isn’t as wide as it usually is, but at least it’s there as she asks, “You said that, did you? To whom, Dante?”

No objection to the madly part, I notice, and even though it was meant to make her smile, I think my plan might have backfired. I’m definitely smiling more. “Oh, yes. He’s my co-conspirator in that confusing, self-deprecating master plan I mentioned. I just didn’t tell you the whole plan.”

“Why, because you hadn’t thought of it all yet?”

“You know me too well,” I admit with a chuckle. She shakes her head and her smile starts to fade, but I’m not about to give up that easily. So I go on, “I think I’ve finally worked out the rest of it, though.”

“Oh?”

“Mhmm,” I say, running my fingers through her hair absent-mindedly. “You see, first we’re going to take care of these Crows.”

“Eviscerate them, naturally,” Nalissa says firmly.

I find myself thinking about whether I would be holding her now if Wynne hadn’t been in Amaranthine. I pull her closer again and agree, “Naturally.” It takes a bit of effort to chase the thought away, but when I do, I keep talking. “Then we’re going back to Denerim, and I’m going to invite back that marquis who said you shouldn’t be queen—”

“This is a terrible plan unless it involves letting me dye all his hairpieces ridiculous colors while he’s distracted.”

“Better. I’m going to tell Isolde he insulted her dress. Just turn her loose and watch the silk and wigs fly.”

Nalissa really laughs this time, and she finally starts to relax against me as she teases, “Your cunning knows no ends! And that sounds like an especially fun way to be rid of both of them. I approve.”

“Good, because after that, we’re getting married before anyone else can try to stop us.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I wonder where I got the nerve to say them. Somehow, even after it’s already been announced to all the realm for—Maker’s breath, nearly two months now, it still feels bold to say. A declaration that means more to me than the words, because it would mean she’s mine and I am hers in a way that no one could take away. And because I worry, and because her breath catches in her throat in a way that I hope isn’t fear, I add nervously, “That is, if that’s—if you still want to.”

Her smile softens, and her thumb tightens around my hand in a way that gives me courage. “An angry high dragon couldn’t keep me away.”

She really means it, I think, and the certainty with which she says it makes my face burn. So naturally, I spoil it with another joke because that’s what I do. “Also good, because I’ve promised Dante he can be the ring bearer. It’ll really make the wedding extra Fereldan, drive off all the snobby Orlesians.”

At that, Nalissa smothers her laughter into my shoulder to keep from waking the whole keep. And I kiss her hair and enjoy the moment of peace. I’m not foolish enough to think it will last—even I don’t have enough bad jokes to keep her distracted until this is over—but she’s been wound so tightly ever since she saw the Cousland seal on that letter, it puts me more at ease to watch her let it go for a few minutes.

When she raises her head again, she’s giving me that shy little smile that makes me feel like I’m the only thing in the world she’s thinking about. It makes my heart beat faster, and I’m sure she can feel it.

“I love you, Alistair,” she whispers, and now my heart all but leaps out of my chest and starts doing flips. You’d think by now that might have worn off, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever hear her say it and not feel like it’s the most important thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t think I’ll ever want to.

Before I can do anything more than most likely grin like a fool, the door swings open and I’m half blind. Dante’s claws click on the floor as he rises, presumably as used to surprise attacks as we are by now. Nalissa rolls toward her side of the bed and what is most likely a small armory’s worth of daggers hidden close by, and even though there’s no weapon within reach myself, I place myself firmly between her and the door.

I have just enough time to think that maybe I should have started keeping my shield under my pillow when Zevran’s voice calls out, “Hold your various projectiles, if you please!”

Nalissa lets out a short, frustrated sort of sigh. “Do you possess the capacity to actually announce yourself before you show up uninvited?”

Even with the light from the hall shadowing half his face, I can see Zevran’s smirk. “Am I interrupting? How rude of me! I can of course wait outside. How long would you like? Thirty minutes? Ten?”

I only manage to sputter in outrage, but Nalissa gets to her feet and hisses, “Oh for Andraste’s sake, light the blighted lamp and get out of the hallway before someone sees you!”

Zevran laughs but does as she says and shuts the door, sliding the latch back into place behind him. How he had even opened it without making enough noise to alert either of us is beyond me. Maybe we were too distracted, and that thought is… worrying. Sure, me being too distracted makes sense, but not Nalissa, especially not right now.

“There, happy?” Zevran asks, interrupting my train of thought with raised eyebrows. “Just the three of us. Now, if that was your plan, I must say I don’t object, but we’ll need much longer than thirty minutes…”

His eyes flicker toward Nalissa, pausing with interest where the hem of her tunic ends just above her knees, and I suddenly find that I haven’t wanted to kill him so badly since he ambushed me and Sereda. Okay, maybe not kill, he is still trying to help us. Maybe just lightly maim.

“Zevran,” I warn, and naturally, he laughs at me.

“I jest, I jest! Just when did you get so dour? Why, Alistair, it’s almost as if being king has made you serious.”

Nalissa lets out another, much deeper sigh. This time when I look in her direction, she has her arms crossed and looks just as tired as yesterday. “Can you please just skip the posturing and tell us why you’re burgling into the keep several hours before sunrise?”

“Of course,” Zevran agrees with a nod of his head, but still he pauses to grin at me and add, “See, at least she has manners,” as if he possesses anything of the kind himself.

The next moment, he produces a scroll from a pouch at his side and holds it out toward Nalissa. “I managed to find a copy of the original contract.”

“One of them was carrying it?” Nalissa asks as she takes it from his outstretched hand. “How thick can they get?”

“Of course not! Physical contracts are only held in the Archive and by the client, everyone knows that.”

“So you found out who it is?” I interject hopefully, but Zevran shakes his head.

“Only the original contract owner, I’m afraid. Four and a half years old by now, and as I said, everyone involved is very dead except your lovely friend here.”

The crinkling of parchment interrupts him when Nalissa’s hands close tightly on the edges of the contract. Her voice is dazed, like something has just knocked the wind out of her, as she reads the name aloud.

Zevran speaks, something about, “you gave me the idea,” with whatever follows completely drowned by the ringing in my ears. The signature itself is vague, just initials, but I recognize the spiky R. H. because I’ve seen the scrawl dozens of times, at the foot of every letter my father ever received from Amaranthine.

“Rendon Howe.”

---

Four and a half years, Zevran had said, and I look up at the date frantically, certain he’s wrong, that he just has two different attempts on my life confused. But there it is: 2nd Harvestmere, 9:28 Dragon. A week before the trip to Orlais I had blamed all this time, two solid years before the attack on Highever. I would have been just shy of seventeen, I realize, and that thought makes my head spin. What could I possibly have done that he wanted me dead?

Then it strikes me like a backhand across my face, and I can almost feel the bite of his ring behind it. He had turned my father’s words on me so many times, using them to get into my head more precisely than any physical wound he ever gave me, but the answer to all of this was in the first words he spoke to me in Fort Drakon.

I remember the shackles binding my wrists and ankles to the wall, holding me in place as he struck me. I remember the blood matted in my hair, half of it mine from the head wound that had knocked me unconscious, half of it Roderick’s where I had sobbed into his chest as he lay dying. And I remember the torches casting flickering light onto Rendon Howe’s face, how I had sworn he must be a demon because no mortal man could be just standing there and laughing.

“Bryce’s little spitfire, indeed,” he sneers from the memory, so close I can feel his breath on my face. “Bright, fierce, headstrong, he called you. Let us see how strong you really are.”

And finally, I make the connection I had missed, hear the words in my father’s voice with a laugh at the end, as he always did when he made excuses for me. As he did when I had refused a proposed betrothal to Thomas Howe, sometime in mid-August, four and a half years ago.

“Don’t touch her,” Alistair’s voice orders and I shake my head quickly. The motion is sluggish and my hands are unsteady, but I fill my lungs with as much breath as I can manage and then let it out slowly.

“I’m fine,” slips past my lips before I can think any better of it.

He chuckles, but it sounds nervous. “How is it someone as clever as you hasn’t come up with a better lie by now?”

“Let’s call it a bad habit,” I manage to answer, forcing my right hand to release its death grip on the contract so I no longer have to stare at the blighted thing. I switch my gaze to Alistair instead, and his eyes are dark and worried. Suddenly I feel even more exhausted than I did before I fell asleep, and when I rub my eyes, my hand is still shaking.

“Come sit down,” Alistair says quietly, and I let him lead me to the chair by the writing desk without argument. “Let me see,” he adds, and I realize I’m still clutching the contract in my left fist. When I release it, he takes it without a word. His expression only darkens as he reads.

“I must say, I’m rather surprised you’re so shocked,” Zevran says from where he still stands by the lamp. “Has this same man not tried to kill you more than once?”

I can only stare at him, because I don’t have an answer. I can’t quite explain why it somehow feels like a second betrayal to learn Rendon Howe had paid for my life and still broke bread at my family’s table. That even unknowingly, I had still considered him an uncle after he tried to have me killed just for telling him no makes me feel sick. Finally, I manage to ask, “How does it help? He’s dead. He can’t have been the one to reopen it now.”

“Who can do that?” Alistair chimes in, waving the contract in the air for emphasis. “She’s right, this can’t be useless. It must point to someone.”

Zevran nods. “It should help create a list of suspects shorter than ‘anyone that didn’t want her as queen,’ to be sure. Only someone with knowledge of the original contract could have paid to reopen it. A confidante? A wife? A child?”

Alistair tenses and shoots a look toward the door. “Nathaniel?”

“Where was it?” I interrupt, before he can go off on a witch hunt in the middle of the night.

“There is a trick panel on a display case in a downstairs storage room,” Zevran answers. “Quite well hidden, in fact. I am not at all surprised it was missed by anyone not looking for secrets.”

I grimace. “Let me guess: behind his medal from White River.”

Zevran raises his eyebrows at me and says in surprise, “Beneath it, but yes. In a tidy little compartment with a few other documents of little importance. How did you know?”

With a sigh, I shove myself to my feet. “Because all of this started at White River. We should see what there is to learn there before we start making guesses. Show me.”

Sneaking Zevran downstairs thankfully isn’t difficult, but rifling through the mess of paperwork in Rendon Howe’s secret hiding place is. It makes my stomach uneasy to read his writing, and even more so the contents of the “other documents of little importance.” Whatever Zevran had said, most of them are very relevant, at least to me. They’re a million little pieces of a story I hadn’t understood, still can’t understand, even looking at all the tokens of Howe’s hatred. They range from an official commendation bearing King Maric’s signature that congratulated him but still praised my father and Leonas Bryland for saving his life to an angrily crumpled letter from Lady Eliane to her brother full of pleas for him to make amends with her husband and stay his anger. That it’s here and not in South Reach tells me that it was intercepted before it could ever be sent.

Below that is a diagram of Castle Cousland. My breath catches in my throat as I flatten it out and trace the red X’s where someone has marked the guard posts, drag my fingertips over the lines drawn to indicate patrol routes. Three rooms in the back are circled. My parents’, my brother’s, and mine.

“Are you quite certain this is the best use of our time?” Zevran asks, and I look up to see him tapping his fingers rather impatiently on the cabinet. Even Alistair is frowning down at the commendation letter like it hasn’t given up enough secrets.

I clear my throat and shove the attack plan aside. Zevran is right, it will do me no good to focus on that now. “Perhaps not,” I admit, digging through what remains in the compartment. “I had hoped for some more recent insight, but most of this is…”

A phrase catches my eye, a footnote at the bottom of a report I had barely skimmed. Only the Wardens could save him now.

I unfold the page and read it more carefully. It’s a healer’s report, I realize, and it’s for Thomas Howe. The text confirms what his father had spat at me near the end, that the boy had been injured by darkspawn and the Blight had taken hold inside him. But he hadn’t died immediately.

“How long can someone live, if they’re blighted?” I wonder aloud.

“I’m not sure I would call it ‘living,’” Alistair says slowly, coming to look over my shoulder. “It varies by person, but the body always rots faster than the mind. They might have a few months at most before the corruption turned them mindless.”

“Then Thomas is definitely out,” I say with a sigh, passing the report off to him.

I’m about to admit that this was useless when Alistair realizes aloud, “This is why he drugged Riordan.”

I shake my head slowly. “I don’t follow. Who’s that?”

“The ‘Orlesian Warden sneaking into the city,’ that’s Riordan,” Alistair answers, tapping his finger against the page to indicate the passage he’s reading. “Though they’re wrong, he wasn’t actually Orlesian, just stationed there. He was one of the senior Wardens in the order. He sneaked into Fereldan during the Blight, and Howe tricked him and threw him in the dungeon. He must have thought he could tell him how to stop the corruption.”

“That’s true?” I ask, mostly because no book I’ve ever found on the subject has ever really given a straight answer. “The Wardens can actually save someone that’s been blighted?”

This time, Alistair doesn’t respond right away. His eyes flicker to Zevran before me, and when he finally does look in my direction, he seems to be speaking to someone standing just over my head.

“Whoever wrote this definitely believed so,” he says slowly. “It’s not quite that simple, but in—in a way.”

I had once joked that if Alistair ever tried to actually lie, he would be so bad at it that his face would give him away instantly. In this moment, Maker, I think it is. I feel my eyebrows start to tug lower and force them back to neutrality again, because I… don’t know if I want him to realize I see it.

“So are you saying he could still be alive?” I ask, half a beat too late.

Alistair continues to weigh his words very carefully. “No. The, er, necessary ingredients weren’t exactly available outside of a Warden keep or safehouse, and Riordan wouldn’t have told him anyway.”

I nod slowly, then conclude with a possibly overexaggerated grimace, “Well, I guess this really was all completely useless then. Sorry for dragging you down here again, Zevran.”

“My pleasure, of course,” Zevran answers, but his words sound less honeyed than usual. He’s still looking at Alistair too.

I don’t want to keep looking at this pile of things with Rendon Howe’s handwriting all over them, so I shove them back into a stack and drop them into the compartment they came from. The one that ends up at the top makes me shiver. It’s the contract for one Talverd Wainwright to work as a healer to Fort Drakon and the estate of the Arl of Denerim. Alistair hands over the healer’s report and I add it to the pile, face-down, so I don’t have to look at any of it as I shut the hidden latch. I want to light the whole blighted thing on fire.

I wish I had never suggested coming down here. Nothing we’ve found has made me feel any better, and neither has whatever Alistair isn’t telling me. It’s definitely about the Grey Wardens, and I want to believe that he just isn’t allowed to talk about it—bound by some sort of Warden statute of silence, perhaps. But Zevran isn’t a Warden either, and that look Alistair gave him seemed to say not to speak.

So exactly what is it that he so specifically doesn’t want to tell me?