Chapter Text
Neve and Bellara feel the change before Rook does.
They’re sprinting, all three of them, through a burning pocket dimension while Neve frantically scans the weave-lines for a weakness in the arcana structure. Light pulses from her fingers, snaking through the fake molecular wireframe of false trees, stone, and fire – igniting the illusory world for what it is.
Magic woven so tight it’s real as any prison.
Rook rushes forward, the gambit’s focus at their wrist flaring as they change invocation from lightning to fire. A pack of dark spawn (not real dark spawn, they don’t have the song-shriek in them) rip themselves from the mud and hurdle down the stone path at their tiny strike team.
“Neve?!” Rook shouts as they lash one of the spawn in an arcane fist. They yank the thing airborne, throwing their spellblade through its ribcage, then ripping it telekinetically back into their fist before hurdling the corpse into its fellows. “Neve!? You got a path out or am I burning a fucking hole in this place?”
Bellara rabbits away from the dark spawn, electrocuting them with a yell as she dives behind Rook, putting a Grey Warden between her and the threat of blood-to-blood infection.
“Blight?!” she cries.
“It’s not real!” Rook calls back.
They rip mana from the ether, connecting it as a current between their focus and their blade… then Rook ignites the entire pathway in a fireball. They fill the corridor with flame, atomizing the false monsters as they scramble madly toward them. When smoldering ash and cinder are all that remains, Rook waves a hand, knocking a burst of air down the path to clear the smoke.
“Neve, are we going this way?”
“I don’t know, something is wrong.” She sounds frustrated. Furious. “The maze keeps shifting. He’s changing it on the fly. I— Bellara?”
“I know this. I know it,” Bellara whispers.
She moves to Neve’s side behind Rook. They walk as they work the runes together, reading the weave, trying to decode it well enough to find its nexus and (by extrapolation) its exit. Magic far, far beyond the hyper-violence Rook is expert in so Rook guards their path as they move. They walk slowly, following Rook who scans the darkness, nervous to know that the fake spawn don’t sing to their blight-sense.
Rook clears two more spawn packs before they shout, over their shoulder, “Guys?”
“I’ve unlocked part of it. I think. Another section keeps changing. So fast,” Bellara whispers, her voice straining. “I know this magic but it’s so old. I need time. Neve. Can you help me with this rune matrix? If I can just–“
“Rook. Can you hear me?”
Rook is in the middle of stabbing a spawn through the skull, ichor spraying and burning away instantly in the heat of their casting. They stumble, nearly hitting their knees because – fuck the stars and the songs within them – Solas’ voice is so fucking loud it makes their entire skull shiver.
“Rook?”
“Ah! Fuck!” Rook goes down on one knee, pressing a hand to their head. “Solas?!”
The pressure gentles. This time his voice comes more softly, a voice in their ear, less a bell rung. But even gentle as he’s trying to be for Rook’s sake, each word is a blow. Each syllable shoulders itself to the forefront of their mind, Solas crushing their own thoughts against the interior of their skull to assert themselves.
It hurts. The hurt, strangely, is a relief.
“The Veil is thin here. Elgar’nan has you trapped in a slip space.”
Rook grits, “Yeah, no shit.”
“Rook?” Neve is at their side. “Rook talk to us.”
“It’s Solas,” Rook pants, sweat running down their face, aware that Neve is touching their jaw to tilt their gaze up, looking into their eyes for some sign Rook is about to seizure or be lobotomized by blood magic. They struggle to speak, gritting, “It’s okay. I— Solas? Either help us or shut up. I can’t focus if you’re talking like this.”
“Rook. I am with you. I will not leave you but hear me: You’re about to be separated from your companions.”
Solas is so calm, so unusually comforting in his tone, that Rook instantly knows the old god is alarmed and pretending not to be. That, more than anything else in this fucking nightmare of blood magic and horror, puts a cold knot in Rook’s belly. They repeat the message to Bellara and Neve who get very loud very quick, but Rook can only hear Solas – his words lashing Rook’s senses to them like a hand around their throat.
“Elgar’nan is narrowing his focus, tightening the trap to capture you specifically. Your companions have done well and will slip the net, but you won’t slip the noose. I can help you, but they will need to break the anchor from the outside. Tell them. Now. We don’t have time.”
Rook repeats the words.
“Fuck me.” Neve begins to cast a spell, fast, messy, knitting a string of magic like a bracelet around their wrist. “Bellara! Tracer cantrip! Now! Right now! Or we’re going to lose them.”
Rook can feel something is wrong now. Like they’re getting pulled left, but reality and Bellara and Neve are being pulled right. It’s a casting, spell work tuning itself like a fine and brutal fist around their body. They can’t move suddenly. The details of the maze are melting around them. Rook feels crushed, like a flower between the planes of a press.
They can’t breathe.
“Neve?” Rook is dizzy. The magic is so… it’s so fucking big, so godsdamned dense around them, they can’t fight it. Can’t move. “Neve. He’s… he’s got me.” The paw blindly for the lyrium dagger, pulling it from its hidden sheath, pressing it to her hands. “Take it. If he gets me… you gotta keep going.”
“Rook!” Neve takes the dagger, but takes their head between her hands, staring down into their eyes. “Rook, listen, I’ve got you,” she says softly, like a vow. “Bell and I? We have you. Just stay alive. We will get you out of—”
Reality shatters.
Literally.
The illusion fractures along its rune joints like a struck mirror spiderwebs on impact and the veneer of a forest and stone explodes into nothing, to blackness. For a moment Rook is nowhere. Then the spell snaps to a new configuration. Hard. Rook hits the ground with a yell, the spatial displacement knocking them to the floor of a new reality.
A room. Twenty by twenty. Like a temple foyer in the Dalish style, lit by no visible light source and having no visible entry and exit. They’re alone, on their hands and knees, bleeding profusely from their nose, their tongue slick with the coppery taste of their own blood. On the wall – a golden mural of the All-Father.
Typical.
Rook’s head is splitting.
“Solas?” they manage.
“I am here. Follow my lead. Endure.”
“Endure? What the fuck do you—”
A hand closes around Rook’s unbroken left horn. The attack comes from behind them, the grip yanking them backward by the base. (Like you control a dog by grabbing its collar.) Rook yells. The sudden wrench to their neck puts them on their flank. Then they’re dragged bodily, thrashing uselessly, across the floor.
They still have their spell blade. They twist, grab their attacker at the wrist and slam to the bone through their enemy’s thigh, channeling fire through the metal and detonating the energy inside the leg. The explosion, usually enough to dismember the targeted limb, does absolutely fucking nothing.
The figure turns.
Elgar’nan – the First Born of the Evanuris, ancient elvan God of Tyranny – looks down at Rook with such unvarnished annoyance it’s almost funny. Then he grabs Rook’s hand around the spellblade and (with the air of parent prying a child’s grip from a door handle) shatters every bone from wrist to fingertip.
Rook blacks out.
They wake up to Elgar’nan’s saying, “Rook, is it?” A laugh. “I’m afraid there are no moves left for you.”
Then he throws Rook into a wall with such force the impact dislocates their right arm and cracks most of the ribs in their right side. (Fuck. This is fucked. They are fucked.) Rook can’t scream after an injury like that, but they hit the ground already grabbing a potion from their belt and breaking it across their thigh. Healing hits like adrenaline. They dive, hard left and rolling into a desperate sprint past the would-be-god.
To what? They have no idea. This is a room with no exit.
They just don’t want those hands on them again.
Rook hits the far wall with two palms, full speed, slaps the stone and pivots to put their back in a corner. They’re panting, frantic. Fear has them like poison – snaking through their veins, shivering lines of adrenaline because there is no fucking way out. There is an Evanuris in the room with them – towering, nearly twice as broad in shoulder, dwarfing Rook who is generally dwarfed only by hurocks and ogres.
They are fucked. They’re so fucked.
Elgar’nan waits.
He waits for Rook’s breathing to level off. For the anticipation of pain to give way to impatience for something to fucking happen—
“There is it.” Elgar’nan says, almost gentle. “Acceptance. Is it not a relief?”
“Rook.” Solas, his voice bleeds into their brain like aneurism, almost narcotic compared to Elgar’nan’s aura. “You must buy time. Rile him. Now, or he will choose practicality and kill you outright. Do it. Now.”
“Fuck you,” Rook manages, baring teeth at a god because why the fuck not? “I don’t accept anything; you hopped up, blight-fucked maniac. When I finish gutting your sister, I hope you’re there to watch it.”
In their head, Solas says, “Brace. I am so sorry.”
Then Rook gets hit very, very hard by a telekinetic wall of force and is slammed like a rag doll against the wall. The magic holds them there, writhing, clawing, a full foot off the ground as a thousand fishing lines of old elven magic punch through their armor and begin to stitch themselves through Rook’s body and soul.
Rook screams.
They don’t know for how long. Elgar’nan… drags it out for a while.
It’s small comfort that it’s not Elgar’nan himself doing this, but some extension of his power through this pocket dimension, a ghost-touch so brutal it’s flaying Rook alive without ever lying a physical finger on them. They’d be offended about dying to some psychic projection, but they’re very preoccupied screaming like an animal being gutted without the courtesy of a mercy-kill.
The Joining was worse, they manage to think, hysterically. But it’s a close thing.
Rook blacks out again.
Wakes up to Elgar’nan’s hand closed around their throat, his thumb running along their jaw while the sound of their own gagging, blood-gargling breaths fills the air. They dissociate from their own body until – far far too long a time later – the bindings shimmer in their skin and hold them immobile.
The butchery and stitching stops.
“Still sane?” Elgar’nan muses. “Fen’Harel has empowered you, hasn’t he?”
Rook can’t hold a thought together. Their ribcage feels split open, their bruised soul exposed so some blight-mad mage can touch their terror directly. There are a thousand strings run through them now, easy to pluck a scream from and Rook can barely whimper as Elgar’nan presses a thumb against their aching lips, his other hand vicing tight around their throat.
“Good-bye, Rook.” It’s almost wistful. “I will not wait to see what you become.”
“Elgar’nan!”
The hand on Rook’s throat slackens.
Solas speaks and Evanuris on the verge of killing Rook simply stops killing Rook in favor of staring, fascinated, like he’s seeing them clearly only just now.
“Solas?” The god’s lip curls. “Are you… speaking through your pet?”
Rook is rather wondering the same thing, but they’re too relieved to not be dead or tortured to complain much. Also, Solas’ voice is so fucking loud when he’s projecting beyond Rook. It hurts. It’s suffocating. And the Dread Wolf suddenly has an awful lot to say.
“I am speaking through the thinness of the Veil so that you might hear me clearly.”
Elgar’nan’s touch, lingering on Rook’s lips, brushes feather-light across their cheek and a sudden coolness spreads across their nerves, smoothing the agony away. It’s such instant reprieve from pain they’re shaking, almost sobbing with relief. They can feel their wounds magically knitting shut and oh fuck, fuck, fuck that’s not good.
“You are speaking through them,” Elgar’nan murmurs.
“Do the basics of this casting escape you, Elgar’nan?”
“Oh, your desperation betrays you.” A touch runs possessively over Rook’s cheek, to the side of their head, grabbing their hair at their nape and pulling until they yell. He laughs, “You need this pawn. Don’t you?”
“Oh?” Solas wraps his words in truly lethal condescension. “You so well understand my grip on the Veilguard rebellion? You understood it so well, their god-killer did not slay Ghilha’nain’s archdemon? Did not slit her face open at Weisshaupt? The blighted dragons died at Rook’s hand? Not the Wardens or the Crow lances?” Solas laughs, easy as arsenic. “Snap Rook’s neck, I promise, the next piece I take from you will be a shock.”
“You’re stalling.”
“No, fool, I am gloating.”
Elgar’nan’s lip curls. Rook sees it. Somehow, Solas must see it too because he instantly adds on:
“Trapped behind the Veil and I am still outwitting you.”
Elgar’nan says nothing for a moment, then, “The last time you talked like this, I had my boot on your neck, Fen’Harel.” His smile takes on a predatory shine. He leans close enough that Rook’s skin buzzes. They shiver as the old god murmurs, to Rook, but not seeing Rook, “Should I remind you how that felt?”
Aside, to Rook alone, Solas says, “He’s going to assault you.”
Rook hysterically, internally, thinks, Is that not what he’s been fucking doing?
“Not like this. He won’t kill you if he’s distracted with this.”
Elgar’nan grabs Rook’s battle leathers and tears them open like thin linen, all the buckles coming instantly undone. Rook freezes. For a split second they don’t accept what it means. Then they catch up. Rook yells, thrashing but the arcane bindings hold them immobilized, suspended and helpless as Elgar-nan then tears their trousers open from hip to ankle.
Rook gets the impression he could have magicked them naked. That this is all some... replication of something else, something that has nothing to do with Rook at all. Obviously. Rook doesn’t fucking matter. They’re just the set dressing in this weird play and if they’re screaming while each act runs down? Who cares?
“Just endure.”
“Fuck you!” Rook yells, but to whom exactly, they aren’t sure.
Once Rook is all but naked, Elgar’nan laughs. “Your protégé whines just like you.”
“I can make him stop,” Solas says, alone to Rook, deep inside their panic-hazed brain. “I know what to say, but he will kill you. We cannot—”
Make him fuck me.
Rook cuts Solas off, before the Dread Wolf can simply inform them that being brutally raped is the only option, that he’s not going to listen either way if Rook begs to die rather than endure.
Rook thinks, loudly: Buy me time. Whatever it takes.
There’s a long silence. Then, aloud, in that shared ether where Elgar’nan can hear, Solas says, “Rook is not my proxy!” He says it with a bit of… panic. Solas is never panicked. The panic is the fucking bait. “If you think hurting them is hurting me, so eager to repeat a base personal victory—”
“I hear,” says Elgar’nan, looking at Rook, “that Qunari don’t prize sex as intimacy.”
Rook, sensing even this is for Solas, nevertheless grits, “We don’t.”
“And you? Broken from the Qun as you are?”
“Just stick your cock in me if you’re gonna do it, you deranged fuck.”
That earns a cruel smile.
“You are so much like him. Aren’t you?”
Elgar’nan without ceremony, loops his hands under Rook’s bare knees, folds them over his palms and spreads their legs with an indifference that seems extremely well practiced. Rook still struggles. (Struggling is the point.) Their hands are still locked magically at their sides. They kick, twisting, yelling, but the god’s grip is machine-strong, inevitable as physics, pressing Rook’s knees up against their own chest.
He seems to expect what’s between Rook’s legs – not the cock their at-a-glance masculine aesthetics might assume. Maybe he smelled it on them like Taash did. Maybe he felt it while he beat the shit out of them earlier.
Either way, the air feels briefly cool on the spread interior of their cunt right before a god of retribution (are you fucking kidding me?) does what any common rapist would do and shoves his cock in Rook’s hole. It happens too fast for Rook to follow, to anticipate, or see what exactly the state of the organ fucking them might be.
Rook can only throw their head back and scream as it happens.
It’s both worse and better than they were anticipating. Every muscle in their lower belly tenses, their insides spasming around the relentless push of heat, stretching them and filling them until Rook’s entire core shakes with the strange agony. But they don’t tear. Don’t rip open and bleed into themselves.
It happens and before Rook can catch their breath, an Evanuris is seated deep within them. Pressed body to body with them, pinning Rook against the wall. His clothes and hair smell off, like dust and smoke, not like a person with a body should smell. Rook isn’t sure why they’re focusing on that.
Maybe because they’ll go insane if they think too hard about anything else.
Solas, his voice splitting Rook’s skull: “Try to endure it. As long as you are able. If you break too fast, he will bore of it—”
“An act of worship.” Elgar’nan’s voice is honey warm, low and hot in their ear. “If you’d like a new alter to kneel at, little lamb.”
Too loud, fuck, they are so loud. Rook can’t…
Rook doesn’t scream when Elgar’nan snaps his hips forward, upward, taking Rook’s weight up onto his hips. Rook doesn’t scream when Elgar’nan murmurs and rolls his hips back enough that the weight his cock slides briefly free before hilting again into their body. Again and again and again until the sound of their joining is wet and Rook’s clit is hot, aching, and untouched.
It… doesn’t hurt. It should hurt. Why is he not hurting them?
Solas? Rook’s thoughts, already so thready, feel few and far between. Solas, help me. I can’t—
Elgar’nan starts to fuck them. He wasn’t before. That was for effect.
(Is it too late to ask for an out?)
It’s hard, fast, and brutal. An almost clinical movement, driving mercilessly upward over and over until Rook is fighting down a mad shriek, until the ache in their belly gives way to a shuddering heat that makes all coherent thought blur. They moan, writhing as their cunt warms, wets, their vulva swelling slick around the generous weight of the organ inside them.
It’s… getting hard to think.
Oh fuck, oh fuck. C’mon. Not this.
The Evanuris grabs Rook at the hips, lets their legs fall open around his ribs. Gripping them flush, he begins to thrust again. He strokes into them fast and shallow, sawing deliberately along the apex of their cunt so each stroke drags hot across their swollen clit until Rook orgasms, hard, sleeving tight around the cock that’s pleasuring them.
It goes on.
They whimper somewhere in the middle, shakily as the climax tightens them again and again and fucking again. Every stroke is a mind-splitting pleasure. It drives every thought of anything but the next stroke from their head. By the twenty-third stroke past their fifth climax, Rook is slurring, half-delirious as their lover (master/god/aavarad?) laughs at them.
The sound turns them on so thoroughly, they swell hot with arousal and humiliation all at once. Feel themselves come so exquisitely, hot wetness runs between their legs. Tears burn their eyes, their teeth grinding against the fucked out little noises building in their mouth. The instinct to say ‘thank you’.
“Handsome beast,” Elgar’nan murmurs, his lips on Rook’s neck. “You’re a sturdy thing, aren’t you?”
Rook flushes with arousal at the praise.
Rook nearly vomits in horror.
“S-stop.” The word escapes them as a gasp, then a whimper. “No! Fuck! I— mmm—!” They jerk, eyes rolling as fresh orgasm spikes so deep their entire core spasms, their back arching, hips rolling in automatic animal need. Sensation so intense their eyes flutter and roll as it washes across their entire fucking body. They’re slurring, “Can’t— Shtop. Please—"
“Your pet is in heat, Dread Wolf.” Elgar’nan grips Rook at the hips. His thumbs drag then dig into the dip of their hip bones, guiding them into an arched-back attitude as he drives himself deep once more. He does it until Rook is half screaming, half moaning, sobbing between each thrust. “Are you there, Solas? Or have you left them?”
“Stop this.” Solas says it so quietly. So soft. Almost wounded. (Fucking bullshit you’re not fucking hurt, you fuck.) He says, for effect, “This debasement… it’s beneath you.”
Elgar’nan’s cock (already so deep inside Rook) immediately twitches and swells with interest and the man groans, pulling out to rub his (no, please, no) widening cockhead into the seam of Rook’s pussy, spreading them around the head so they can feel it grow. The stretch is breath-taking. Hot and good. Bigger than before and some animal part of them is impatient for the thrust—
Then he pushes inside, growling, “Beg.”
Rook isn’t sure who he’s talking to – them or Solas – so Rook simply obeys.
“Please?” they manage. Their tongue feels numb. Their thoughts are clouded. Focusing is… so fucking hard. “Ah— hngh. Gods, please? Please…"
“Good, Rook.”
The praise lances their entire core with heat. He strokes Rook’s hair, nails dragging where its long in the middle between their horns, taking a fistful to pull their head forward against his shoulder. Almost affectionate.
“But I wasn’t talking to you.”
Rook tries to apologize, but they just moan, mouth hung open as they try to breathe through their building need, the ache in their cunt becoming almost painful and they cry, squirm. Their cunt is so hot. So hot. Their clit is so hard too, throbbing, and engorged. They feel Elgar’nan swirl, roll, then flick them there and they shriek, hips snapping forward.
A split second of sanity. “STOP!” Rook bucks, shouting. “Stop, stop stop—!”
“Beg,” Elgar’nan says.
He flicks their clit again, harder.
Rook’s vision goes dim with pleasure. They can hear yelling in ancient elvan. It’s so fucking loud their skull can’t hold anything but how much they like it. It hurts. It feels good. Feels like dying. But their cunt feels so good it doesn’t matter. Their toes are going numb, their clit throbbing, their insides glowing as a god plunges his cock over and over and over into their hole.
“Beg,” Elgar’nan says again, running a hand up Rook’s back.
Rook begs. They know it’s not for them, but they beg anyway. It doesn’t stop. The All-Father fucks Rook until they are euphoric, insentient, hanging limp but for the roll of their hips to please him. Solas is shouting, but its all elven so there’s nothing but their voices and the fucking ecstasy.
In trade tongue, clearly for Rook’s benefit, Elgar’nan says, “If I pleasure them to death, Solas, will your Veilguard really rally to their corpse?”
Rook can’t think.
“If I show them a whored-out shell, will that stoke your rebellion?”
Rook can’t… remember…
“If I’d done it to you, Solas, would we be here?”
Rook is starting to pass in and out of consciousness. They’re no longer bound, but hanging onto the being sheathed inside them. They tremble periodically with orgasm, their cunt clenching sweetly at the tireless organ within them. Their legs shake. Their nerves sing. How long have they been here? Part of them spasms with the notion something is wrong.
A voice presses into their head, dimming the noise.
“Rook. Are you with me?”
Rook, somewhere under the horror and drugged out religious and sexual ecstasy, manages to string enough thought together to ask, Solas… can you… make him… stop?
Silence.
Solas?
“Please.” Rook gasps between thrusts as Elgar’nan laughs in their ear. They follow their panic to coherence, chanting, trying to push him away. (Like trying to move a mountain.) “Please. Please, help me. Please stop, please fucking stop—”
“He’d have to beg,” Elgar’nan murmurs. “On your behalf.”
Rook screams just to hear themselves do it.
While they still are themselves.
“Hush now.” Fingers run down their ribs, stroking their flank like soothing an animal, cradling their neck, whispers in their ear: “So close now, aren’t you? To oblivion.”
Rook whines as Elgar’nan rocks into them again, slowly, their insides coaxed to another soul-shaking orgasm. They cry out, clawing at his back, their hips already rolling to chase the next ecstasy. Saliva soaks their chin, panting so hard their tongue slips from their mouth like a dumb, fucked beast. Gods, not like this. They cannot die like this.
Elgar’nan whispers, “You’ll know no god but me.”
“Solas!” Rook is slammed against the wall. “Solas, please!”
“He won’t answer you. Now, open your mouth, little Qunari, and I will show you how to worship something well—"
“Elgar’nan!”
It stops. Everything stops.
Solas speaks, into the dead stillness, “Leave them. Rook is not the target of your ire or the architect of the rebellion.” He says something in Elven for a while, then clearly, “I beg you.”
Elgar’nan struck dumb with his cock in someone would be funny if Rook wasn’t literally dying. He doesn’t move away, still stood, pressing Rook to the wall, still obscenely joined with his captive but he doesn’t seem to remember they’re even there.
Rook can’t move or breathe to do anything but try to hold their head together. They’re shaking uncontrollably, twitching and panting as the god fucking them to death shifts slightly above them. That minor friction sends exquisite fire through their belly, has them arching, desperate, eager and hot—
Elgar’nan ignores them, whispering, enraged, “On behalf of this… insect, you’ll prostrate yourself?”
Rook feels that hand, again, close on their throat. The connective medium between each vertebrae begins to strain again with a fresh killing rage. Frankly? Great. Snap away, you fuck. Just make it all fucking stop. Please. For fuck’s sake—
Solas says “I thought you could not possibly fall for the same ploy twice, yet—”
And that’s when the tracer line on Rook’s wrist goes white hot.
Elgar’nan has enough time to be surprised before, somewhere beyond this place, Neve and Bellara shatter his entrapment spell like carnival glass. Reality explodes like dropped crystal and Rook is yanked, hard, through some arcane field and directly into Neve Gallus’ waiting arms. She catches them in the real world, ready for them, but Rook is much bigger than she is, and they go down in the grass together.
Rook doesn’t mean to grab the detective and cling to her like a goddamn teddy bear, like letting go for her will literally rip them to pieces, but it’s what happens. Fuck it. Neve won’t judge. She’s from Minrathous. She hugs them back, hard, her nails digging into their shoulders and neck.
“Rook! I’ve got you! You’re out!”
Bellara softly, somewhere, says, “Mythal’naste.”
Rook rolls off Neve, onto their flank and vomits into the grass. Their armor is still in pieces, their trousers shredded. They didn’t notice before, but their entire body is smeared in enough blood they should be dead twice over. They cannot imagine what they must look like, but reality is so sweet, so free of anything burrowing its way inside their body and mind they can only lie there, laughing.
Neve, with strained compassion, says, “Rook, we need to run.”
They laugh until they retch, “I know.”
Bellara has their shoulder, says, “I can fix it. Rook, get up for me?”
She helps them to their knees. Neve lets Rook lean on her, her hand stroking their hair helplessly as Bellara grabs their belt and uses it to at least get their fatigues back around their hips. She’s so quick, she’s pulled a bit of wire and charm from her pockets and whip-stitched the biggest tear at their hip and knee. Good enough to keep their legs mostly covered.
Their chest armor is destroyed.
They shrug what’s left of it off. It’s done.
When they catch Bellara staring, they realize their ribs are mottled with black and blue bruising. Handprints and the cruel claw of fingertips painted in hemorrhage red across their torso, hips, and thigh. They stare at it for a stunned, staggering moment before Bellara presses her palms to their side and erases the evidence with a wordless look and a healing pulse.
“Easy-peasy,” she says, like its just another battle wound. “I’ve got you, Rook.”
“Can you move?” Neve asks.
She doesn’t ask if they are alright.
Rook huffs, “Yeah. I can move.” Neve hands them the lyrium dagger. It’ll do as a spell blade for now. “I’m fine. Good work with the tracer. I was a goner.” They grin, but Neve looks so immediately put off by their attempt to dismiss this, they drop it and say, “Let’s go. Nothing between us and the Dalish now. Let’s finish the job.”
Rook runs.
If they keep the lead, they don’t have to look at Neve or Bellara. They can just keep moving.
Rook can still feel Solas, like a brain bleed, hot inside their head. They cannot stand the combination reassurance and panic it brings them – so fucking relieved to have the Dread Wolf guarding their back… so horrified to have Solas’ voice tangled up in the nerve-deep heat that still (even now) has their cunt aching. Turned on beyond reason. Wondering about slitting their throat to make it stop.
The timing is suspicious that Solas chooses then to say, “End this and he’ll be the fool.”
“Is that what you told yourself?” Rook snaps, aloud, uncaring about Bellara or Neve listening. “When it was you?”
Silence. Then, “Yes. Now finish the mission.”
Rook keeps running. They’ll talk to Solas later. For now: Forward.