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* * *
Underneath the red sky of Minrathous, in the chaos of the siege, the Viper did not see the blade that struck him, but the song of the blight in his blood cried out immediately. A blast of electricity arced from his hands on instinct, crackling and snapping its way through a group of Venatori until they fell, dead, at his feet. He stood alone amidst the destruction, the smell of burnt flesh hanging in the air, the tang of iron from the blood in his mouth sharp on his tongue. This wound would be his last, whispered the blight.
But this was what he had come out here to do. To fight. To kill. To die.
He was already dying, had been, since he leapt from a rooftop at a blighted dragon and felt its claw sink deep, since he heard the first whispering in his tainted blood. The whispers were so close now. What had started months ago as a quiet tune, nothing more sinister than a half-remembered melody occasionally ghosting against his conscious mind, had swelled in the last few days to a violent chorus that Ashur was nearly powerless to ignore.
The things that it muttered were terrible. Unrepeatable. Unforgivable.
The song cared little for his dull commitment to morality. The song said violence was its own end, and sang to him in desolate vicious harmonies beyond mortal comprehension. In his less lucid moments, he imagined it was the Maker. Perhaps it was.
If this was what the Wardens knew as the Calling, he would not fault the name they had given it.
He had put off answering its call for far too long, propped himself up with herbs and his own magic while the blight festered and spoiled his body, tainted his blood, and muttered its careful savage susurration until all he knew was its sound. His attention drifted. His focus wavered. He stood for long moments without speaking, listening to a new canticle of threnodies sung in hushed whispers that only he could hear. But someone always knew. Someone always waited for him to return. Someone with a pair of dark brown eyes that watched and worried and knew he was lying no matter how many times he insisted, all wavering voice and shaking hands, that he was fine.
Tarquin, he thought desperately, barely able to grasp onto the name as the whispering music crescendoed. It was always loudest when he thought of Tarquin, as if it, too, knew that Tarquin was the reason that anything of Ashur remained in this body. Tarquin, his shield against the rising horror of his daily life. Tarquin, his reason for fighting the transformation of his mind and body into nothing more than a tool of these sinister sounds. Tarquin hated the song, and the song hated Tarquin, and every day it tried to make Ashur forget.
Ashur refused to remain in a world where he could not remember Tarquin, and so the Viper had stumbled outside today alone, determined to make his last breaths count, to choose death in battle over whatever corrupted form this blight would twist him into, a mindless horror devoid of reason, of love, unable to recall the sound of Tarquin’s laughter or the shape of his name.
He had taken as many of their enemies with him into death as he could, trying to make the fight ahead easier for the few Shadows that remained. So many were lost, lost to the world and lost twice to Ashur, who had mourned their deaths at the Wall of Light and then forgotten the names he promised to remember as the blight ate away at his consciousness.
Inside the wreckage of someone’s shop, he slumped against a wall, one hand over the wound in his stomach. Tarquin would not forgive him for doing this. Tarquin would find a way to heal this wound, patch him up, make him rest. All he had to do now was make sure he was not found.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Not this time.”
As he slid down the wall to the stone floor, the song in his blood said death was not far.
“I am not alone,” he mumbled. “Even as I stumble on the path with my eyes closed, yet I see the Light is here.”
He closed his eyes and waited for the light to find him.
* * *
The light, when it came, had a voice of its own, a weight, a purpose. It was more solid than he had thought it would be, and it sounded so familiar. As it called his name, he opened his eyes, watching as this new sound chased away the darkness until all he saw was– Tarquin.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Tarquin demanded, dropping to his knees so he could inspect Ashur’s body, one gloved hand on his chest, pressed firmly like he was trying to will Ashur’s heart to keep beating.
“Quin,” he breathed. “Please. Don’t—”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Tarquin snapped. “I’d say I can’t believe you, but I know you better than that by now, don't I? And I know you’re hurt. So tell me what happened.”
“Tarquin,” he said, staring up into those dark eyes. His own eyes had turned red long ago, and all that Tarquin would see now was the angry glow of eyes that shone like red lyrium instead of eyes that had once been the color of the sea. Tarquin had grown up by the sea. Did he miss the sea? Did he miss the sea in Ashur’s eyes?
“Do I miss what?” Tarquin asked. Ashur blinked his bright red eyes and tried to remember what Tarquin missed.
“I— I don’t— I’m sorry,” he said, though he could not remember what for.
“Forget it,” Tarquin told him, his voice gruff but gentle. It sounded like a song, but not the whispering one, not the one that bade him forget the voice of the man in front of him. No, Tarquin sounded like a warm breeze by the sea. Tarquin sounded like the hymns the choirs sang in the cathedral on Wintersend. Tarquin sounded like a prayer.
“Tarquin,” he repeated, with what he hoped was the reverence the name deserved.
“I’m here,” Tarquin said, gripping the top of his hand. “Ashur, I know it’s hard for you to focus, but I need you to tell me where you’re hurt.”
“Then talk,” Ashur said. A concerning rattle shook his voice. He shook his head, too. “Talk to me. Need to— hear you.”
“All right,” Tarquin said. His voice seeped into Ashur’s mind, filling in the paperthin spaces between the blight’s song, pushing it back, drowning for the moment its discordant murmurings. “I don’t know what the fuck you want me to say. This is bad, even by my standards. We’ve got less than half the Shadows we started with. Everyone’s exhausted. We know we’re probably not making it out of this one. But— we keep on, somehow. It’s— a less cynical man might say it was inspiring.”
“It is,” Ashur said, feeling a smile tug at his blackened lips. He was Ashur again, just for a moment, laughing with Tarquin in the hideout, or on a rooftop in the rain.
“Like I said,” Tarquin huffed, the little noise almost a laugh. He tapped the top of Ashur’s thigh. “A less cynical man might say that. Now. You gonna tell me where you got hit, or do I have to peel you out of that getup and figure it out on my own?”
Behind his mask, Ashur grimaced. There was a time when he would have done anything to hear Tarquin offer to undress him, when his body was still something he recognized and not a decaying blight tendril on two shambling legs, propelled onward by little more than his own vanishing convictions and all his persistent love for a good man.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he sighed. He tried to recall the injury that pushed him here, tried to listen to a body that belonged more to the blight’s chorus than to him. Maker, it was so loud. Maybe he should let it sing. Maybe—
“Ashur. Hey. Ash. You need me to talk again?” Tarquin asked, breaking through the noise.
“Yes,” Ashur said, but that had been enough. He remembered. He pressed a hand to his stomach. “Here, I think.”
Tarquin swallowed hard, but he didn’t hesitate to reach forward.
“Be careful,” Ashur warned, holding up a hand. “My blood—”
“I’ll keep my gloves on,” Tarquin promised, gritting his teeth as he wrestled with the straps of Ashur’s armor, “but I’m not gonna sit here and let you bleed to death in front of me, blight or no fucking blight.”
“You should,” Ashur whispered.
“Fuck off,” Tarquin told him, as he finally managed to open Ashur’s armor enough to see what was wrong. His eyes went wide. “Oh, fuck.”
Ashur knew, had known, it was bad. He couldn’t feel it now, not really, but the blight told him, sang his death to him, was still singing it even now.
“I need to clean this and sew it up,” Tarquin was saying, and Ashur nodded.
The song crowded in again, filling the silence Tarquin left when he stopped speaking and started dabbing at the mess that was Ashur’s stomach. The noise was unbearable, the things it whispered despicable. He tried to hold onto thoughts of Tarquin to keep himself centered and whole, but the blight merely mocked his love for the man tending his wounds, murmuring to him about the futility of it, the impossibility, until he knew little else. He squeezed his eyes closed, willing the noise to dissipate, praying for the strength to hold on.
“I’m right here,” Tarquin said. His hand pressed against the Viper’s mask. “Ashur.”
“What?”
“You’ve been saying my name for the last few minutes,” Tarquin murmured. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I am,” Ashur sighed. He looked at the bloody mess of bandages and salves that littered the floor and closed his eyes briefly. “Tarquin. Please. Go. Help someone who might survive this.”
“What the fuck do you think I’m doing,” Tarquin muttered. “You’re gonna live another day if I have anything to say about it.”
“When did you become such an optimist,” he joked weakly.
“I’m not. I know— I know it’s over. I knew it months ago,” he sighed. Tarquin’s hands stilled, and Ashur watched as he took a deep breath, watched his beard twitch as a muscle jumped in his jaw. “And since it’s over, I might as well fucking say it, so: I love you, Ashur. Have for a while.”
Ashur stared. Tarquin gazed steadily back. For one glorious moment, there was no sound in the world but the beating of their hearts.
“Why?” Ashur croaked. “Why tell me now?”
“If not now, when?” Tarquin asked. He looked away, tore off another strip of cloth and smeared it with salve from a pouch on his belt. “Been trying to figure out how to tell you. Didn’t know if I should. I didn’t want it to be one more thing for you to carry.”
Ashur reached for him, then. It was not the first time in recent days that he felt his hands had moved of their own accord, but this time it was not the blight that moved them, only an aching desire to touch the man he loved. Still, he left the gauntlets on, too tired to pull them off and too worshipful of the man before him to touch him with hands streaked with black blight and rotten from this thing that was taking him over.
“My love for you has never been a burden,” he confessed, his fingers finding the curve of Tarquin’s jaw, careful not to scratch him with the points of his gauntlets.
“Oh,” Tarquin said. He cleared his throat. “Well. Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, then.”
“I didn’t tell you, either,” Ashur said. He let his hand drop, too exhausted to hold it up any longer. “I should have.”
“I would’ve liked that,” he sighed. “I would’ve liked a lot of things, with you.”
“Tell me,” Ashur asked, his fingers brushing against Tarquin’s sleeve, too weak to reach out again but unwilling to let go. “Tell me the future, even if it’s only ours for now.”
“It wasn’t like I had any big grand plans,” he said, as he bent forward again to stitch up Ashur’s wound. “Just— simple dreams, I guess.”
“I like simple,” Ashur murmured. “Something about our lives should be simple.”
“That’s the fucking truth,” Tarquin grunted, frowning as he had to stop his stitching and reach for more bandages. “I guess a distraction wouldn’t be bad right about now, huh. How about this to start, then— when this is all over, we get some fucking sleep.”
“That does sound like a dream,” Ashur hummed. He rested his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, imagining the peaceful warmth of Tarquin’s body next to his in bed.
“Yeah,” Tarquin agreed. “We’ll just— wake up on a quiet morning in Dock Town with my windows open, nothing worse happening outside than the fucking gulls squabbling over some bread, and have nowhere to be but there.”
“Peaceful,” Ashur murmured.
“Sure. Except for the part where you take up the whole damn bed. Don’t act like you wouldn’t,” Tarquin said.
“I would,” Ashur agreed. “If only so you could pretend that you hated it.”
“Would I be pretending, do you think,” he grumbled, but Ashur heard the smile that he couldn’t see.
“Yes,” he said, nudging Tarquin’s hip with his knee, earning a small chuckle for his efforts. “What next?”
“Hm. Well, we’ve gotta eat. There’s a market by the archives that has a stand that sells the best pkhali in the city,” he said.
“Bold claim,” Ashur murmured.
“Yeah, but I’m right,” Tarquin said. “The market’s next to a little park on a hill, you can see half the city from there. We’ll sit and eat and you’ll steal all my mchadi while I’m not looking like you always do.”
“You can have all my pomegranate seeds,” he offered.
“Oh, I’m absolutely taking all your pomegranate seeds,” Tarquin said, with the kind of fond exasperation that had always made Ashur hope for something more. “I can’t believe I fell for the only freak in Minrathous who doesn’t like pomegranate seeds.”
“There must be at least one more,” Ashur said.
“Nah,” Tarquin replied, sniffling a little and shaking his head. “You’re— I think you’re probably one of a kind.”
“I would have given you all of my pomegranate seeds even if I liked them,” he promised, with a sincerity that made his heart hurt. “It’s true,” he insisted, when Tarquin snorted in response.
Tarquin shook his head again and sat back with a sigh, his stitching apparently finished. “I don’t know if that’ll hold for long. I think we oughta get you to the healers.”
“They’re busy,” Ashur said, dismissing the idea. “We’re busy. I’m stealing your bread.”
“Ashur,” Tarquin sighed. “The whole thing was silly, anyway. It isn’t anything we could have had, not really. You’ve always had bigger things to do than sit in a park and poach my bread.”
Ashur hadn’t really felt much pain for the last week, too lost in the song to remember he even had a physical body, most of the time. But the resigned look on Tarquin’s face was a knife in the gut that cut right through the noise, angled upwards to pierce his heart. He struggled against the weakness that grounded him and wrestled himself closer to Tarquin, one hand on his thigh.
“I would have given you anything you wanted,” he whispered, his voice too heavy with emotion to carry. “I would have pledged myself to you with no less devotion than I offered the Maker, and I would worshipped at your altar until my last breath.”
“Fuck’s sake,” Tarquin muttered, blinking at him. “If you’re going to say shit like that, at least take that stupid mask off.”
“Please, don’t,” Ashur said, shrinking back when Tarquin reached for him. “I don’t want this face to be what you remember of me.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to forget anything about your face, regardless of what it looks like,” Tarquin said. “And I’m the one who has to live without it, so— I win this one. Take it off.”
It was the last thing he wanted, but it was the only thing he could do.
He reached up and pushed at the mask and hat until they fell onto the floor beside him, too tired to bother unclasping the mask first. He let his gaze follow them as they fell, then closed his eyes as Tarquin’s fingers grasped his chin and gently tugged. Ashur averted his eyes. Though he liked to think of himself as a brave man, he simply could not summon the courage to watch Tarquin look at what had become of him.
“I know it’s bad,” he sighed, as the silence stretched on too long. He was aware of every horrible drip of inky, ichorous blight spilling down from his eyes to cover his face.
“Ashur, it’s just you,” Tarquin said, one gloved thumb carefully tracing over the blight-riddled flesh of Ashur’s cheek. “And it was never your face I was in love with.”
With a wheezy intake of labored breath, Ashur gathered the will to meet Tarquin’s gaze. When he found nothing there but naked affection, he gasped at the sight of it. Salt from his tears stung at the blighted veins on his face before Tarquin gently swiped them away.
“You know what, fuck it,” Tarquin muttered, and leaned down suddenly, as if to press a kiss to his horrible mouth.
“Don’t,” Ashur cried out, his palms flat against Tarquin’s chest, holding him back with the little strength that remained in his arms. “You’re the one who has to live. At least let me die knowing I haven’t caused you to suffer the same fate that I have. Please.”
“Fine,” Tarquin said, leaning back. Ashur watched, curious, as Tarquin tugged off just one of his gloves. Before Ashur could react, Tarquin curved his warm palm over Ashur’s blighted mouth, then leaned in and pressed his lips to the back of his own hand.
It should have felt absurd, this parody of what he so longed for. But the few unblighted patches of skin on his face felt alive again at the touch of Tarquin’s hand, and he leaned into it. With his eyes closed, he could pretend it was different. They weren’t huddled in the remnants of their ruined city. No malevolent force purred its menacing terrors in his ears and rotted his body from the inside out. It was just a rainy morning in Dock Town, and they were pressed up against one another in Tarquin’s narrow bed, or it was a balmy afternoon in Minrathous proper, and they were side by side on a park bench, swapping fried bread and pomegranate seeds. It was the whole of the future they would never have, lived all at once together here in the dark and dying light, all the love and joy they might have had compressed into one single moment.
Tarquin’s dark eyes were fierce and bright in the dim light when he pulled away. “If that’s all we get— it’s enough.”
“It’s everything,” he said, and the next few breaths they took, they took together.
“Let’s get you to back to the healers,” Tarquin said, stepping back and hauling him up. “I know you’re going to fight me on it, but we’re getting someone with magic to look at that wound. I stitched you up best I could but someone needs to stop the bleeding.”
“I won’t fight you on it,” Ashur wheezed, “if you tell me what we’re doing after I steal all your mchadi.”
Tarquin stopped walking and looked over, eying him seriously. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “Live through tomorrow, and I’ll tell you.”
“I’ll try,” he promised.
* * *
The endless days stretched on, and so too somehow did Ashur.
He fought. He killed. When he lost himself in the clamor of the blight’s call, he followed the sound of Tarquin’s voice home.
“What’s next,” Ashur asked, much later, his head resting against Tarquin’s shoulder.
“Since you stole all my bread, I get to take a long bath in your stupid fancy private bathhouse,” Tarquin told him. “And while I do that, you’re gonna read me the next installment of my favorite serial, even though I know you’ll interrupt the story every five minutes to complain about the inaccuracies in the author’s portrayal of the Chantry.”
“They really could do just a little research,” Ashur protested, closing his eyes and listening to the rumble of Tarquin’s answering laugh, his last best antidote to the blight’s call.
* * *
“What’s…next?” he murmured, gasping for breath as they ran together back to the relative safety of the manor, darkspawn at their heels. He focused as best he could on Tarquin’s voice and not the pull of the creatures at their backs.
“We’re going to the fucking sea,” Tarquin said. He slammed the manor doors behind them, and sighed in relief when they both heard the explosions of the fire glyphs that Ashur had managed to fling down as they ran. “Beach. Sun. Barefoot on the sand. Holding hands or whatever. All that romantic bullshit. Okay?”
“Okay,” Ashur agreed, and his hand found Tarquin’s in the dark.
* * *
“Before you ask what’s next,” Tarquin said, as they waited side by side for the final battle to begin, “I think I’m out of ideas. The next one’s on you— so you have to live through this, ‘cause you fucking owe me a good story or two. All right?”
“All right,” he promised, though he had no way of knowing how he would keep it.
* * *
In the end, promises were kept. Perhaps it was not his own hand that kept them, but he had kept himself alive until the miracle happened. Perhaps that was enough.
* * *
In the moments after the end, everything was quiet. No song demanded his attention now, and for the first time in months, his thoughts were his own.
As the sky gleamed golden with light from a sun that was finally able to set once more, Ashur turned to search for Tarquin, his gaze sweeping past panes of broken glass lining the front of the shop he stood by. In one of the larger shattered fragments, he saw his reflection and startled: no red eyes stared back at him now from underneath his hat. Heart in his throat, hardly daring to breathe, he reached up and unbuckled his mask. No more black veins of blight stood out against his pallid skin, but had faded instead to a patchy network of scars. He pulled off a gauntlet, let his fingers trace over them, barely believing what his eyes and hands told him. The blight was gone, leaving destruction, yes, but also the possibility of all the futures Tarquin had given him, these past few weeks— the lazy mornings, the shared meals, the walks by the rolling sea, all laid out before him like a promise. And this one, he knew he could keep.
“Ashur!”
“I’m here,” he called, the buckles of his mask snapping against his cheek as he whirled around. “I’m here,” he repeated, while Tarquin’s eyes searched his face. “I don’t know how, but— it’s just me.”
“Yeah, it is,” Tarquin murmured, dark eyes a little glossy as he stepped close and curled his fingers around the back of Ashur’s neck. “You gonna tell me what’s next, or what? It is your turn. You promised.”
“I did,” he agreed. “I will. But I have to admit, all I really want to do right now is kiss you.”
“You know, I don’t think I mind starting a story that way, now that you mention it,” Tarquin told him, his smile warm and certain like the setting sun behind them.
“Good. And— if the story goes the way I’d like— I think it will be a long one,” he promised, returning that bright smile with one of his own as they leaned closer to one another, and when their lips finally met, all that he heard was the sound of their sighs.