Chapter Text
The tower was a gilded cage. It was very glamorous; enchanted mage robes embroidered in gold, three square meals a day, dessert at dinner with their very own wine at the table, made by Tranquil. It was a good life, until one saw the cracks.
They were numerous, if a mage knew where to look. Anders smiled at everyone and pretended all was well as he walked through the library and browsed for an herbalism manual. High above him, some apprentice was going through his harrowing, and this one would not survive, but not because he gave in to a demon.
He was cut down by a templar blade for staying in the fade too long.
An hour later would bring another mage the harrowing chamber, and this one would sidestep the barely scrubbed away blood pool and submit himself to the rite of Tranquility, the golden sun of the chantry laced with lyrium burned into him wiping all that was him away, leaving an empty shell that walked and talked but thereafter neither felt nor dreamt. A controlled kind of undead.
There was a blood stain near the front of the library that was just barely noticeable. Only the people who were already aware of it would have known to look for it, and sometimes the rare observant apprentice did ask, since even children knew that only iron rusted, not stone.
These were the scratches in the gilding. They revealed the iron underneath, where everything was coated in a layer of dusty red from hundreds of years of built up mage blood, from times where the right of annulment was called, when the entire tower was drenched in running crimson.
The dwarves wrote in their books that stone remembered. Perhaps it did.
Down here in the dark and the damp with only stone around him, Anders wondered that if he talked to the walls, it would talk back, reciting memories of long past gone mages smelling of fear and cold sweat, huddled into a corner waiting for a templar's blade to fall. And not because they had fallen to demons, but because the chantry decided that everyone in the tower must die.
Anders ran away six times. He was a bit of a legend by now, the mage with the vanishing act, stepping through solid stone walls out into the wide open world. Reality was a lot less mystical; no secret passages or spells to render oneself invisible, more along the lines of tied up silk knickers and guards put to sleep with deep mushrooms and deathroot.
They forgave him the first few times, if scrubbing pans with the Tranquil in the kitchens for a month was considered forgiveness. When the punishment obviously did not work - nothing could have kept him from sleeping under open skies, a canopy of stars above him so close he could reach out and touch them, no walls, just the infinite - they had to up the ante. He was left in the dungeons for the fourth and fifth times, solitary for two weeks, then a month.
After the two weeks, he stayed put for four months before running away again. After the one month straight in solitary, he planned his escape right away without waiting at all, and he was gone within a week.
This time they didn't tell him how long he had to serve his sentence. There was a moment during his strip search where he was hit by a wall of fear, as the two anonymous templars fully decked out in their gear and their skirts were close enough for Anders to hear their breathing. Anders was silenced and naked and he realised, he was truly helpless, as one stuck a rounded glass probe inside him to check for contraband.
"What do you expect me to hide up there, a file?" He mumbled, not caring if his mouth got him into more trouble. "And what would I use a file on in a room with no windows?"
"Keep taking and you'll find yourself with something else up there," Orlesian accent, gruff with drink and something else. Older templars were always iffy; half of them were out of their minds.
"You must be joking," and this one was younger and definitely sounded Ferelden. "Mages aren't people. Would you stick your prick in a mabari?"
Funny how morality goes out the window the moment you're dealing with a mage, boys, Anders cursed at them silently. It wasn't as though he had never lain with a templar before, but those were his choices and they were recruits, green and fresh without the stink of prejudice. At least they didn't treat him like an animal.
"The Knight Commander here's too soft on you mage types," the older one had one gauntleted hand in Anders' hair, flexible joints catching the silken strands. "But I don't need to beat you to make your life a living hell. Make my job difficult and I'll make your stay twice as hard for you. Do you understand?"
"Yes Ser," Anders said, tilting his syllables to match the Orlesian's. "Thank you, Ser. I'd be shaking in my boots if I was wearing them, Ser."
The younger templar laughed; the sound echoed in his helm, too loud in the gloom. The older one yanked his hand free, pulling whatever hair caught in them out by their roots. Anders gritted his teeth, giving him nothing.
"You'll be begging for death before the month is out," then he was pushed into the little cell, barely enough room for a cot with a ceiling that went up and up into the dark.
Runes glowed softly in the wall, faint lyrium blue like the veins he saw in his dreams, but these drained his mana constantly. At first, he thought its colour was blue, but by the fifth day, if the changing of the guard was regular and he could count their days by them, he realized that it was simply a glow that had no colour at all.
Anders was in a Tevinter dungeon built by dwarves and used by the Chantry. He found all that strangely ironic and by turns funny, that with all the power of the empire, they didn't do any of their own construction, relying on the dwarves, which built everything out of proportion. Try as he might, Anders couldn't make out the ceiling - he must have been at least four or five levels underground, with nothing but rock on the other side of the stone wall, with the ceiling stretching impossibly away above him.
It made the walls even more oppressive, if that was possible.
They were subtle; he'd give them that. The food was gruel, overly salted one day and completely flavourless the next, his drinking water was pissed into one guard shift out of three, and every few days or so, his sleep was interrupted constantly, each loud bang on the door sounded not minutes after his eyes closed. Anders was certain that it was the same templar, but when they didn't talk there was no way for him to tell.
At the end of one week, one of them did talk to him, only to bark out commands. Anders thought to disobey, but to what end? He had no weapons and no magic. Keep your head down, Karl used to tell him. Anders was never good at that sort of thing.
"Back into the door and put your hands through the slot," they were quickly tied, three loops with a rope and a quick knot that he could undo easily but these were templars, not sailors. His hands were pushed back through the slot, and the door opened outwards.
Two templars trudged in, and by the sound of them talking to one another, Anders guessed that they were the same two that threw him in on the first day.
His ropes were quickly traded in for the manacles attached to the wall, arms pulled above him so high it forced him on to his toes. They were iron and rusty with age, covered by something flaky and not entirely like rust. Anders held still as one cold bucket of water was dumped over him, followed by a rough scrubbing with a bar of brown lye soap, stinging and reddening his skin, and a ice cold bucket of water was dumped over him again, leaving him shivering in his bonds.
"Your magic doesn't work down here, mage," the Orlesian showed him a small blade, just a sliver of rough steel wrapped up in a bandage. He ran the tip of it over Ander's neck, not enough pressure to break the skin.
He began to quake in fear, the strain of trying to hold himself still so that it wouldn't actually cut him only making it all worse. The blade dragged over his neck and over his collarbone, drawing a line over one nipple. The templar had one hand over his shoulder, keeping him still. Anders could hear his breathing, laboured behind his helm, and the templar's skirt was close enough to brush up against him.
"You liked that, you sick bastard," Anders was sure he felt it, something hard jabbing at him under that skirt, rubbing up on his thigh. It wasn't the right thing to say to a person holding a blade to his chest, but he was never one for the 'right' things to say.
Anders had always been impulsive. A week of not speaking to anyone at all only made it worse, the words stored inside him bubbling to the surface like so much bile. The templar dropped the blade, unbuckling his gauntlet without a word, before doling out a backhand hard enough for Anders' vision to black out for a moment.
Then he was let out of his manacles and they were gone, the door banging shut behind him. Anders rubbed feeling back into his hands. Cold and shivering, he crawled his way back to the bed, finding it bare - the mattress still there covered in burlap but there was no blanket on top of it. Anders curled into a ball on the bed, hugging his knees to his chest for warmth.
He didn't remember falling asleep, the shivering getting worse and worse over the night, if it was night, and the rough lye soap never quite washed off entirely, leaving his skin raw in patches where it rubbed against his rough sheets.
Anders dreamt of boiling red oceans with a green grey sky over them, sailing in a ship built of bones. When a wave hit them hard, spraying water all over the deck, he wiped at his face, hand coming away from his skin wet with blood.
"The sky is blue," someone said, and Anders wondered if he was going mad and the stone was really talking back at his delirious babbling. "I'm pretty sure the ocean is blue too, or green. I've never had a chance to see it for myself."
He couldn't see the face behind that voice, even though no helm covered it. Anders tried to blink away the sweat clouding his vision, but they were heavy and the grit in them scraped at his eyes, and he winced. The furrow was going to become permanent between his eyebrows. That someone who never saw the ocean was wiping at his face with a soft cloth, moist with warm water and his touch was gentle.
Deep in his fever, Anders let that touch lull him back to sleep.
When he woke he was alone, and Anders shook his head, clearing away the clouds that had invaded his mind while he slept. He was so hungry he was certain his stomach was eating itself, and parched as though he hadn't had anything to drink in days.
Anders swung his legs off the bed and nearly put his foot in a tray, with half a loaf of bread sitting in it, along with a small hunk of cheese and a pitcher of what smelled like watered down wine.
He picked it up and ate it ravenously, tearing chunks of bread out with his teeth; it was the first solid food he was given all week, and while he was sick he had lost count of the days. The logical part of him knew that it was just day-old bread that needed soaking in wine to be palatable and the cheese was only a heel, hard with age, but hunger and the general going without made it fit for the gods.
Hazily, he tried to recall the person in his dream, but all he could remember was a shock of red hair on an upside down and too young face. Not wearing a helm either, which was unusual, and treated him well while he lain ill, which was even stranger.
Outside, it was morning. Cullen swung his legs over the side of his bunk bed, and promptly hit his head on the top bunk getting up. He yawned, and reached for his daily dose of lyrium, neatly dispensed in a paper pouch on a rack with his name on it. He slipped it under his tongue and waited for the numbing sensation to turn into something that zinged and brought the world into focus.
The tranquil came in at predawn and lined the shelves with the stuff, but they were so quiet he never saw them.
"Late night?" Said a voice above him, "sneaked out to visit your girlfriend, did you?"
"Good morning, Ser Carroll," Cullen grumbled, rubbing at his forehead. "There is no girlfriend."
"Holding out on me, are you? Come on, you can tell me. Does she have a ... friend?" Carroll waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
Cullen ignored him. The lights in their room were on, wisps in lanterns and sconces by the door lit with an eerie blue light bordering on but not quite white. It was so gray in here.
Caroll moved like a gnat, for the lack of a better description. He darted from one spot to another, grabbing a shirt here, checking his time sheet there, moving a mile a minute.
"Will you stop it? You're giving me a headache."
Carroll chattered all the way to the communal baths and all the way back, with Cullen giving him one word answers hoping to shake the jittery templar off with his unresponsiveness, but he was not so easily discouraged.
"It's that star apprentice always going in and out of Irving's office, isn't it? She really gets around, you know that runaway mage down in solitary? I heard she even -"
"That's quite enough," Cullen said, louder than was necessary. "Amell isn't like the rest of them. She's much too young to be - doing any of those things you're insinuating."
Seeing that his friend was actually upset, even Carroll knew when to shut his trap, "all right. Just don't say I didn't warn you."
Ser Carroll walked away backwards, holding his hands out in front of him in a placating gesture before turning around and running off. Cullen sighed; there were rules and his friend didn't follow any of them. Running in hallways was strictly prohibited.
He blushed then, and Cullen blushed easily, as he remembered that he did sneak out last night, but not to see a girlfriend. He had gone down into the solitary cells and it wasn't even his shift, walking right by a snoring guard to visit a sick mage.
Four days ago, it was his evening shift and the mage didn't touch the tray of gruel he slipped through the slot at dinner. He went in to check on him then, and found Anders passed out on the floor, naked and shivering. Cullen had to run back up the stairs, bringing down extra blankets - why didn't he have a single one? - and towels and hot water.
The mage was feverish and mad, and Cullen saw that as his responsibility since Anders had taken ill on his shift. It was only his duty that kept him there, signing up for extra shifts until he was better.
Only that, not the way torchlight shone off his red gold hair or the way he turned his head into Cullen's neck as he was picked up, scorching temperature burning a hole in his skin, or the way he tried to make out Cullen's face as though he was worth remembering, someone needed and important.
He flushed crimson as he wiped the mage down with a moist towel, wrapping him in neatly with a blanket afterwards so he could look away at last, not be mesmerized by the way his skin glowed in the runic lights that rendered all else colourless.
Cullen stood, still as a statue, and let his mind wander. He remembered his helm today, so the trappings were complete. He gleamed in silverite, the metal sitting heavy atop his shoulders, his priest skirt weighted to drape to his ankles, and he pointed his toes in the perfect angle that all recruits were taught to do, distributing all that armour over his heels in a position that literally lasted for hours.
In his cage of silver Cullen stood and only half watched the mages as his mind went on a journey, described in Anders' babble of red oceans and green skies. He added pirates and sea battles, fuzzy at the edges, filled in with the faces he knew, of Solona Amell dressed in a velvet gown and bound to the mast with rope, and himself, Cullen the pirate swinging across on a rope - attached to Maker knew not what - and coming to the rescue.
He was aware of the real Solona the moment she entered the room. She walked with someone, a tall and handsome man with brown hair who already passed his harrowing and wearing his mage robes. They sat together, and he was sure they joined hands under the table, out of sight.
When they disappeared behind a shelf holding ancient treatises of Thedas an hour later, Cullen didn't walk over to interrupt them. He blinked away his annoyance, that urge to do something, anything at all, to keep her somehow to himself. It was all pointless. He was never going to say anything to her, as he had long known that it was impossible since day one. What use was there in pining?
Honour. Duty. Those things had value and place in his life. He could only watch her from afar and let her live out her caged life while he lived his, parallel lines which did not meet.
Cullen watched them as they each emerged from behind the shelf, hair a little disheveled and cheeks flushed, the man leaving first, then Solona, taking a book out of the shelf to sign out of the library to hide her purpose. He clenched his fist, the metal clicking in his hand as his fingers tapped against his palm.
They moved around him, day in and day out, playing out the little drama of their lives with love and hate and turnabouts. Some of them did not live beyond childhood, even Solona might not live through her harrowing. Each of them taking what they could in the small space allowed them, and even that was more than what Cullen had.
All he was entitled to was to observe, to live through these little snippets he scrounged through the gaps in his helm, surrounded by what he wanted but could never have.
He heard whispers and gossip of Anders, of whom he had started to think of as his charge, now that he had taken an interest in the mage's health. Sixth escape and they threw him in solitary, and the rumour that went around was that he would be down there for a year. Seventh would probably bring him either death or tranquility, and yet the man kept trying.
He was fascinating to most, and a week after his reappearance and the hand-down of his punishment Anders was still a hot topic. Charming and likeable, by the concerned tones of the mages who spoke of him, a friend to most and a lover to some. They wanted to find out how he was, how he was faring, and they lived through him in a way; the mage who was outside and had all these adventures and saw the ocean and mountains for himself.
It was as though he still lived here among them, a ghost flitting from one table to another, his old jokes and his escapades told and retold. He was still free and he had presence, even locked up in a little cell in the depths of the tower.
Cullen listened, and lived through him too. Inside his helm, he felt the touch of sea breeze on his brow and the smell of salt carried in the wind. The world around him disappeared and he heard the distant fluttering of sails.