Chapter Text
They are bloody and aching in the aftermath of a gruelling battle, but Adamant Fortress is quiet apart from the moans of the dying and injured. Demons have been escaping rifts for nearly sixteen hours, and Cullen has been beaten nearly black and blue from the effort. For now, the world is still, as the Inquisition’s army waits for something, anything.
And then, all hell breaks loose.
The rift opens with the sound of the very fabric of the world splitting and the Inquisitor, the tiny wisp of a woman forced into fighting because of the mark on her hand, powerless because of a mark on her forehead, falls out of the rift with Alistair close behind her. The Grey Warden is holding her arms behind her back in an iron grip, trying desperately to subdue the thrashing screeching woman.
It sounds like a demon, and Cullen takes a moment to realise that the hairs raising on the back of his neck are not a result of the utterly disturbing sound, but a result of hostile magic he cannot place the source of. Cassandra follows from the rift a moment later, but the scene is so wildly unprecedented that Cullen is struggling to figure out what the fuck is going on. He offers no help, trying to understand what could possibly make a tranquil scream, too busy trying to find the source of the raising temperature and the burning stones beneath his feet.
Cassandra delivers a smite only a moment later, and all sound stops.
Alistair grimaces.
“So, a tranquil walks into the fade…”
Cullen hadn’t noticed it at first. When Cassandra and the prisoner had approached him at the entrance to the ruins of the Temple of Sacred Ashes, the prisoner had been covered in so much grime and blood that he couldn’t even tell her true hair colour.
Her expression had been blank and her response to his questions had almost been forced, but Cullen had chalked that all down to shock and, perhaps, a bit of petulance at being imprisoned. She’d had the mark on her hand, a connection to the fade, and so Cullen never had any reason to suspect she was anything other than a normal prisoner.
When they meet later in Haven’s Chantry, however, it is impossible to deny the truth. Evelyn Trevelyan walks in, shoulders low and with her eyes cast to the floor, and Cullen inhales sharply at the stark red Sunburst Seal branded on her forehead.
We’re doomed, he thinks privately.
He has never regretted the Rite of Tranquility before, but the moment all in the room realise that their only hope of closing the breach lies in the hands of a woman who cannot feel one jot of emotion, regret begins to feel possible. Her only reason to close the breach is to survive, an instinct not even tranquility can overpower.
Her voice is flat when she greets them, and Cullen wants to scream.
“What do you mean, you can’t find any information on her?”
“Circles do not need to keep much information on tranquil mages, Cullen. You know this. They rarely do anything noteworthy enough to put in a record. Everything I have only goes as far as nine thirty-two. I cannot even find information on why she became tranquil, though she has admitted to me that she willingly chose it.”
Leliana had put up with his questioning with her usual grace, but even she looks unsettled at the total lack of information they can find on their so-called Herald.
“What makes a young woman, a noble young woman with unprecedented benefits at the Ostwick Circle, willingly choose tranquility?” Cassandra looks down at Ostwick on the map as she speaks, her lips twisted into a frown. It is a familiar expression, worn so frequently since they discovered the truth of the Herald.
“We can only guess. By all accounts, she was an apprentice with an affinity for healing magic. There was never any perceived threat from her, and it seems there were no doubts about her ability to pass the Harrowing. She wasn’t even offered tranquility as an option, she actively sought it out.” Leliana motions to the notes on the table with frustration; they are barely five pages long.
Cullen runs his hand over his eyes in exasperation, frustrated that of course she could have been a talented healer. The very thing they need most right now is a healer, and here is a woman who was supposedly gifted at healing yet sundered from the fade.
“What shall we tell the people? They are steadfast in their belief that she is the Herald of Andraste.” Josephine’s expression is unsettled, her lower lip pulled between her teeth in uncertainty.
“Tell them the truth. We cannot pretend she is not tranquil, and even if we tried the truth would come out quickly. The Grand Clerics will not be happy about this.” Leliana looks grave, her brows furrowed in frustration. Josephine only nods, sharp and quick, and begins to write on her parchment.
“If we are to survive this, she will need to be trained to fight. There are already reports of rifts opening across Ferelden and Orlais, but my soldier’s won’t react well to sparring with a tranquil. Cassandra, will you take charge of that?” He looks over to the dark haired woman, who nods in acquiescence to his request.
“Of course.”
The Herald spends her days in Haven alone, working by her small hut with an array of potion-making equipment. She works diligently, crafting healing and stamina potions, or venturing out for ingredients with a staff she cannot use slung over her back, head low to avoid attention. Few offer to collect those ingredients with her, or keep her company whilst she brews the very potions that keep them all alive. Her expression rarely changes, only summoning a small smile when her companions do speak her to, and even then only for their benefit.
Varric finds it all pathetically sad. He feels sorry for the wisp of a woman, whose complex potion skills betray a mind that might have been sharp and quick had it not been branded, and who does go out of her way to make sure that her companion’s needs are cared for, no matter how little interest she might have in them herself.
Sera, Varric notes, spends her time either avoiding the woman or drawing her into increasingly nonsensical conversations in an attempt to evoke emotions in her, but her failures result in Sera becoming too freaked out to be near her. The periods of avoidance usually come after the failed attempts that unsettle the blonde too much.
Blackwall is courteous around her, and offers to help her carry heavy boxes of ingredients or vials if he happens to be nearby, but the man never seeks Evelyn out of his own free will, and he is too disconcerted around her to do so.
Iron Bull is much the same, protecting Evelyn ferociously on the battlefield, but unwilling to seek her out outside of it.
Solas outright refuses to go near the woman, not because he dislikes her, but because the very idea that she is sundered from the fade both saddens and disgusts him, and merely looking at her is enough to send him into a dark contemplation on the ruthlessness of humans. He had confided in Varric one evening, after trying to sit with her, that he had attempted to find her mind in the fade, but had found the area where she should be only dark and shadowed. He had described it like a candle snuffed out by stamping it into the ground, and it had taken Varric a while to get that image out of his head.
Vivienne treats her as she would every other tranquil in a Circle, which mostly amounts to ignoring Evelyn unless she needs something from the woman. That annoyed Varric, truth be told.
Cassandra, who spends the most time with her, is one of the kindest towards her. But even that is in the Seeker’s usual gruff and awkward manner, and is mostly born out of the fact that Cassandra regularly beats the smaller woman onto her arse in the sparring ring.
Cullen’s reaction to her is also an odd one, Varric observes. Cullen never looks unsettled around her, per se, but he cannot look at her without a curious expression that is half sad, half mortified, flickering across his face. At first Varric had been confused, wondering if perhaps Cullen had met Evelyn before, until the realisation hit him like a giant sack of red lyrium. Of course Curly would be unsettled looking at her: the woman is a walking reminder of the fate he allowed many innocent mages to be subjected to under Meredith’s tyranny.
So Varric ponders the woman who does not care that she is lonely, does not feel lonely, and decides that it doesn’t matter. He won’t let the woman who is meant to save them sit alone on an evening, whether in Haven or by the camp fire when they are out on a mission.
The reports that start to come in from the scouts become disturbing.
They have begun to take Evelyn to the rifts in the Hinterlands, now that the area is relatively free of enemies and she can defend herself with the blade of her staff. Cassandra had thought the staff the better option: with it being light and easy to swing, it is the better option for Evelyn’s weak arms, where she can use momentum to inflict damage rather than brute strength. In the training ring, she had proven mentally unable to try the abilities of close-quartered fighting with daggers due to her tranquil-induced lack of cunning, and she is too physically weak to fight with a sword and a shield.
The first rift they take her to, the proximity of the fade and the mark on her hand combine to create the most disturbing display Cassandra has ever seen. Evelyn closes the rift, her hand still clenched into a fist, and turns to Cassandra with a profound look of desperation on her face. Unfamiliar magic crackles through the air like a whip, and Evelyn reaches for her hand and begs her to kill her.
A moment later and Evelyn shuts down, utterly tranquil and unaware of the tear tracking its way down her cheek. Cassandra stares at her, nearly open mouthed, and shivers.
Cassandra is unable to sleep for almost a week, haunted and disturbed in equal amounts by the life she had briefly seen in Evelyn’s cold, empty eyes.
Yet, it keeps happening.
Every time Evelyn closes a rift, Evelyn gains a minute or less of conscious emotion, and begs or pleads or laughs and cries in equal turns, begging Cassandra to change her situation before the calm mask descends on her with all the force of a door slamming shut. It begins to feel like there is another woman inside her, and the episodes grow in horror and drama until one day, a desperate Evelyn manages to break free of Cassandra’s hold and grabs Sera’s dagger from its sheathe on her hip.
It is sheer, utter luck that the effect of the rift wears off before she can do anything with it.
An angry Sera demands that they stop sending her out to close the rifts, but Cassandra knows they have little choice but to do so.
They’d had no choice but to help the mages in Redcliffe: though her fellow mages avoided her as though she had the plague, Evelyn herself was unable to channel the magic through her mark. The mages were needed to help close the breach.
One of the downsides of her being tranquil, Cullen had quickly realised, was her inability to be swayed from a decision by anything but logic. He could plead and argue for her to go to the Templars until he was blue in the face, but if she did not see the logic in the decision then she simply did not care.
When they return from the terrifying events at Redcliffe, however, Evelyn gains an unlikely friend in Dorian. When he gives them his account, it becomes clear that the Evelyn he spent time in the future with was a little different to the Evelyn they have come to know. With the breach everywhere, just enough of the fade had come through to alter her, to allow a little of the old Evelyn through. She’d seemed odd, Dorian admits, a little emotionally stunted with a very dry sense of humour, and she’d absolutely lost control when faced with the rifts, but she hadn’t seemed tranquil until they’d returned to the present.
Because of that, Dorian has grown fond of her, and unlike the rest of their companions he actively seeks her out for company. Of course, the fact that Evelyn tends to sit there quietly brewing her potions whilst Dorian talks and talks surely helps Dorian’s opinion of her, but Varric senses there is something more to it.
“Will she be safe?”
“She does not have a choice; we have preliminary reports of a giant rift inside Adamant Fortress. The Inquisitor must go in.”
It had been a controversial decision outside of the Inquisition to make the Herald their leader. But she had deserved it, had put the effort in even if she did not have the feeling behind it, and it was her decisions they were following.
Orlais had not taken it well, if Cullen were entirely honest.
“Listen, she will be protected.” Cullen continues, his eyes on Cassandra. “She will have you with her, Seeker, as well as Bull and Solas. Alistair should also be ready to help once you are inside. Just get her to the rift, and stop Clarel.”
“Maker turn his gaze on us.” Cassandra makes an odd movement, as if to start pacing, before she aborts it, and Cullen rests his hand on the pommel of his sword. The anxiety of the situation feels like a physical atmosphere in the room. “This would have been difficult enough if she were fully capable of defending herself, Cullen, but this? These are highly trained Wardens.”
“You must try. We have no other choice.”
When a demon is all that stands between them and the giant rift back into Adamant, Evelyn Trevelyan stops Cassandra with a hand around her wrist and pulls her back for a private word.
Only minutes earlier, the Spirit of Faith had placed a gentle hand on her forehead, and Evelyn had collapsed to the ground. When the fighting was over, and the Spirit gone, she had awakened to find magic thrumming beneath her fingers, but the control on her mind slipping slowly away by the minute. The Spirit must have done something to protect her from the dual blow of her emotions and her magic returning at once, but it will not last long.
“When we return, I will not be…” She trails off, gritting her teeth tightly against a wave of pain in her mind. “I will be as I am near the rifts. You must smite me.”
“Inquisitor, I-“
Another wave hits her, as Evelyn tightens her grip on Cassandra’s wrist. It is tight enough that Cassandra can feel the bite of her nails through the leather underside of her gauntlets, and in that moment the Seeker’s eyes meet with Alistair’s over Evelyn’s shoulder.
The Warden nods, and Cassandra voices her acquiescence.
“So, a tranquil walks into the fade…”
Cullen breaks out of his stupor, pushing forward past a grimacing Cassandra to take in the scene before him.
“What the hell is going on here?”
“Well, if you let me finish, I can tell you. A tranquil walks into the fade, and comes out emotionally stable and in control of her magic. Except, she’s not stable, and I think she has no control over her magic. At all. You know, in case the melting flagstones weren’t obvious enough.” Alistair adjusts his hold on the unconscious Evelyn, looking to Cullen with a clear look that says help me.
Warily, Cullen allows Alistair to deposit her dead weight into his arms, one hand under her knees and the other under her shoulder blades. It takes a moment to notice, what with her being covered in dirt and soot and blood, but once he does he cannot tear his eyes away from her empty, blank forehead.
“A spirit of Faith, Commander.” Cassandra stands next to him and brushes a lock of Evelyn’s hair from her face. The action is soft, almost fond. “We met a spirit who resembled Divine Justinia. The Inquisitor had already seemed somewhat human in there, but Jus- the spirit touched her, and the mark was gone. Solas and I believe that she truly was a spirit of Faith. We have no idea how long until she returns to her tranquil state, however.”
“I believe she never will. We have a dangerous situation on our hands.” Cullen manages to stop himself from reacting in surprise at Solas’ voice when he interrupts: he had not noticed him come out of the rift alongside Cassandra. The elf casts a spell over Evelyn, to ensure that she does not awaken until they are at least back at Skyhold, where she can be dealt with properly.
“Dangerous?” Cullen asks, still mystified by the slightly pink skin where there used to be a bright red brand.
“This is a woman who has been tranquil since she was eighteen years old, Commander. Nearly a decade of tranquility will have left its mark on her. She did not take her harrowing, no? She will be vulnerable to demonic possession, and she has no control over her magic.” Solas looks disgusted as he speaks, but Cullen knows it is because he does not think it right that Evelyn was ever made tranquil in the first place.
Cullen asks Cassandra to deal with the Wardens: the Inquisitor clearly cannot deal with them herself, and he and Solas quickly leave Adamant with her limp body in tow. Solas ponders aloud beside him as they walk, and Cullen quickly understands the gravity of the situation.
The Evelyn who will awaken at Skyhold will either have the personality of pre-Tranquil Evelyn, or will be weighed down with the struggle to find herself in the midst of the mess around them. She will struggle, she will hurt, and she will be forced to develop her personality and deal with emotions she has not felt in nearly a decade. She will have to learn to control her magic (and Cullen is no longer certain her abilities lie in healing after the boiling stone floor in Adamant), learn more spells and fighting properly with a staff. All in the middle of the mess Corypheus has dumped them into.
All this is reflected on his face, he knows, when he enters the main camp still carrying Evelyn in his arms, and Sera lets out an audible gasp. Varric stares as he ducks into a tent and gently lays her down onto a bedroll. Sera and Varric have followed him in, and they both take one look at Evelyn’s blank, how could it be blank, forehead before turning to each other with identical looks on their faces.
“Friggin’ shiteballs.”
“Well, shit.”