Sisters of Tevinter

Solitude

     Jor's ears were ringing, as if bells had been cut loose in the temple of her skull. Her ribs were agony, her palm was seared as if by the tongs from a forge. Her heart pounded so hard in her chest she thought it would tear through her skin and land in the ice and rock piled around her. Her head was a mass of heavy, dizzy pain. 

       It was silent in the darkness but for the steady drip of icicles and the hiss of a draft over stone. Jor pulled herself into a sitting position with an agonized groan. Every breath turned to jagged needles in her lungs. Her head swam, as if someone had pushed her underwater and wasn't letting her come up for air. 

       Maker... Jor groaned, cold eating at her limbs to aid the pain. She closed her eyes, warm, welcoming darkness cupping fuzzy hands over her vision. Sleep, child, it whispered. Sleep. Rest here. 

         Sleep sounded wonderful. Jor sighed and draped herself over the chunk of marble she was clinging to, her consciousness fading away into blissful, ignorant silence...

         Wake. Now is not the time for dreams. Something urged her to rise. To open her eyes. A frigid drop of water struck the crown of her skull, ringing another, clearer bell. 

         Reluctantly, her breath ragged and uneven with pain, Jor crawled out of the pit of stone, the cold rock meeting flesh in regretful, icy kisses of goodbye. How the scholar longed to lay still... 

          Go, a voice in her head whispered desperately. Go. She thought of Kaisen's anguished calls as Cassandra lead her away. She thought of Solas' frightened blue gaze. Bull's heavy breath as he gathered the mage to him. She couldn't let them mourn. She wouldn't. Not while she still breathed. They were alive. This would not be Alexius' chambers again, nor would it be reversed. She would not lay here and die after something so brutally cracked the chrysalis of her life open to the elements. 

            Slowly, painfully, Jor hoisted herself up, leaning against the icy walls of the tunnel, her fingers scraped and blackened with cold and soot and blood. How it hurt. How it all hurt so much. A ragged sob rattled the shattered nerves of her spine and chest. But she put a boot forward, resting her heavy weight on one agonized knee. Then the other. 

        The cavern expanded forward in rotting timbers and gleaming mirrors of ice. Jor forced herself along the path, stumbling, her breath turning to fire and acid in her mouth. Fog and mist left her lips in wisps desperate to escape her burning body. She thought of Kaisen's lava red hair, of how she slept curled protectively against the world. She thought of Varric's laughter, his ceaseless work on the stories he told so well. 

         Every step was another memory. Bull's incredulous grin as she gathered blood lotus, the ocean lapping at her heels. Solas' little laugh as she spoke of the stars. Krem taking her arm with a patient smile. Cassandra's steady hand at the skin of her side to wrap her wounds. Her soldiers singing and dancing below her, relieved to finally be free. 

          The tunnel widened in the dim light of the ice all around her. A dark blue flame was lit in the center of a stone archway. Someone had built it there... 

           There was a noise, and Jor's blood ran as cold as the snow around her. Her heart pounded in her ears. A hissing rasp of some unknown language sent shivers down her aching spine as a dark tattered cloak drifted across the archway, its bony hands alive and fogged with cold. All hope was leeched from Jor's pores, despair setting deep in the forefront of her brain. That terrible feeling of emptiness deepened to chasmic proportions as a second creature responded in the same whispering voice, ice crystals dripping from a skull full of fangs. 

         The demons hadn't seen her yet. How had they gotten here? It didn't matter... They'd gut her. Kill her, turn her bones to ice and ash and probably drag her back into the Veil to suffer for all eternity. It made Jor feel so incredibly hollow to see them drifting aimlessly through the air.  

            Warmth spread slowly to the fingertips of her left hand as the rogue stood there, immobile, hopeless. It hurt... she was aware of her pain again. The mark on her hand, what had the monster called it? The Anchor. 

        Not entirely sure what she was doing, her mind a haze of pain and curiosity, Jor raised her hand, flexing her fingers. The Anchor branched outward in a brilliant flash of emerald light, a crack like a whip. The demons shrieked, caught unaware, too late. 

        A rift tore itself open in the air in the center of the cavern, shimmering with unearthly radiance as it swallowed both the creatures whole. And then it vanished, leaving nothing but the taste of ozone in its wake.