After six years in Kirkwall, Cullen never thought he'd see the mighty Hero of Ferelden ever again until one night when she appeared unannounced in his room requesting him to help her track down a dangerous blood mage. Can he come to terms with his u...
"Maker, though the darkness comes upon me, I shall embrace the Light. I shall weather the storm," Cullen's clasped hands trembled -- the skin raw from the tear of salt water, the calluses rising from every grip of striated rope. He kneeled in his corner where on occasion a few pirates watched from across the way. They never joined in, but they didn't call out or interrupt either. No one seemed certain what to do about the man who was neither chantry nor civilian.
Shifting on his exhausted knees, he began again, the drip of words from his brain as reflexive as parrying with his blade. "I shall endure. What you have created, no one can tear asunder." Endure. He knew that word far too well. Wore it in every scar upon his skin, screamed it in every nightmare embedded in his mind, feared it in the beat of his heart. Even as everything around him fell, somehow, Cullen endured.
"Who knows me as You do? You have been there since before my first breath. You have seen me when no other would recognize my face..." Cullen paused again, the next words rattling against his abraded nerves. "You," he wet his cracked lips and gazed down at the dog prostrated before him. What Honor got out of his praying was beyond him, but she never left his side. "Maker, You composed the cadence of my heart."
His tenuous grip slipped, Cullen's palms parting as the rest of the prayer faded from his mind. Why? Why did the Maker have to build his heart to yearn for hers? Grief swelled up, devouring the meager strength in his body. He fumbled off his knees to land against a support beam, an unfinished nail swiping at his already tattered shirt. What was he doing here? Bobbing on the middle of the northern sea passage on the way to Tevinter, he -- a once knight-captain of the templars -- risked his life, his position, his sanity for...for what? People didn't come back from the dead. They passed through the fade and on to the Maker's side. Two years, for over 600 hundred days he'd struggled through the grief like a man crawling across broken glass. And, just when he thought he found peace, fate threw him a final foolish chance.
Peace. Cullen snickered at himself for the thought. No, it wasn't peace. He'd found monotony, safety in the mundane of moving through the motions of living without risking himself again. He packed his heart away in the sky blue bottle along with her false ashes. By the Maker, what was he doing here? They'd had, what, a few months together, and that was being generous. For all he knew, Lana had no plans to...
His head collapsed onto his chest and he shook it. No, he was trying to stir back up the anger because hating her, hating himself, hate in general felt better than the frozen lake of grief. As strange as it sounded, the idea that the king intended to swipe her out from under him kept him going. It struck against the primal competitive nerve. Before, Cullen didn't worry what would happen if they reached the end of their journey and discovered nothing; how he'd face the empty journey back. His only concern was in beating Alistair. And now... He believed him -- believed that, despite putting so much effort into finding her, he had no intentions beyond possible friendship. Not that Lana will be forgiving and forgetting his transgressions so...
He kept doing that. His mind waffled between past and present tense. Sometimes she was long gone, lost in the fade two years ago, nothing but ash in the wind. Others, occasionally even mid-sentence, he believed as fervent as anything in him that she remained out there, alive and reachable. If the ship didn't kill him, the hope would.
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