Chapter Text
This time, he passes the days before and after the Inquisition's initial arrival in Redcliffe with his head buried in any and all castle plans that he can find.
His mind fills with the rectangular floor plans and bold strokes of black ink. He does not even register what the Herald says to him during their brief conversation at the Gull and Lantern, in that warm, deep voice of hers, and cannot sweep a fainting Felix away to the castle fast enough.
His hands shake feverishly when he mixes the healing powders for his son, and his thoughts race endlessly along those ink corridors... Until he gets it. He finds it. The discrepancy in wall thickness. He is no mathematician, not like Felix, but even to him, the explanation is clear as day. There is a secret passage. And now that he knows where to look for it, he has another announcement for the Venatori guards.
A few well-placed explosive glyphs to collapse the walls, and the passage is sealed. In vain does the Herald stall the conversation when she next arrives, waiting for her agents to emerge (she banters with Alexius, about the "trustworthy sort of face" he has, and he responds to her with special relish... because he's anticipating what will come next, of course). In vain does she keep glancing at the silent, masked rows of Venatori guards. They stand unyielding, all pristine white fabric and flaring steel.
Until Alexius snaps his fingers.
They charge forth in unison, like statues coming alive; two at the very least for each member of the Herald's entourage. The southerners do not have time to bare their weapons. Nor does Dorian — who has found his way among them, ever so clever — have time to jump to their aid.
In an instant, their arms are twisted behind their backs, almost to the point of crackling like broken twigs; and spiked, armored gauntlets press into their neck and spine. Some have their life cracked out of their bodies, for struggling too much. The rest are forced to bow.
Alexius shifts uncomfortably in his throne. He shudders at dry snap of bone when a member of the Inquisition, a kinswoman of the Herald's — a girl, almost, with unevenly chopped blond hair — is killed for trying to bite her captor.
And he cannot bear to look at how Dorian is being held back and subdued. He does not want to read the silent, seething hate in the boy's eyes; nor does he need to. He can imagine it as it is, clear as day.
But he does meet the eyes of the Herald. Intense, forest-green. Defiant.
His heart and mind both jolt with a sudden uneasy thought. A foolish thought, laughably so — he is about to erase her from existence, damn it! — but the sight of the Herald, a Dalish elf, being dragged across the room nearly on her knees, towards him, a Tevinter magister... it feels profoundly wrong.
He rises from his seat and approaches her, to get it over and done with.
She gnashes her teeth, white strands obscuring the green flame, and headbutts one of the Venatori restraining her. Their grip loosens, but the second Venatori still stands firm, and does not hesitate to shove back at her.
Alexius' blood runs cold.
He can distinctly hear them call her "rattus".
"NOBODY WILL BE CALLED THAT!" his voice thunders across the room, while he nigh on races up to the Venatori, grabbing them by the arm. Forgetting that he is not the authority they answer to.
"Not even our enemies."
Such folly. He thinks himself noble and just, does he, by allowing this woman — who robbed his master, his new god, the future savior of his sooner! — one last shred of dignity. But he is long past justice. If he stops at every turn to consider justice, he will botch this timeline as well, and...
It is already too late. The Venatori did not just insult the Herald. They pushed her too forcefully. Too viciously. She hit her head against a nearby pillar — where a tiny circle of red now blossoms; and the same shade mars her snowy hair, in the very center of the crown.
She lies perfectly still, her knees folded at an awkward angle. Dead. Before Alexius could get to her. Before he could do what the Elder One asked of him. This is the third time he's failed, now! But at least... At least she will not be getting in his master's way any longer — that has to count for something. Please, please let it count for something. For Felix's sake.
"Mamae! Mamae!"
That cry is so shrill, so thick with tears, that it echoes within Alexius' very core. He cannot help but turn to look: and sees that another captive has burst free. The one that, in the previous timeline, he nicknamed "Random Southerner Number Five".
The Random Southerner is a dwarf. Young, scarcely Felix's age; with ruddy cheeks and a bright ginger beard and enormous blue eyes. Alexius remembers him hovering beside the Herald, in the crowd somewhere, in times past. He seemed a good-tempered, genial sort of young man, but now the sight of that limp body, of that red stain soaking through white hair, has transformed him beyond recognition.
Tightly balling his square, pudgy fingers into fists, he has punched each of the Venatori that have been holding him. Right the groin. While they reel and huff and curse, he leaps at Alexius, face contorted.
Alexius grabs at his mage staff, frantically summoning mana to defend himself... But whatever charge of magic he manages to channel, is not enough to deter a dwarf. The red-beard yanks the staff out of Alexius' grasp. The effort makes veins bulge through his glistening, raw-pink forehead, as Alexius locks his fingers as tightly as he can. But eventually, the staff slips out of his gauntlets' claws, with sparks leaping in all directions and the screech of metal drilling into his temples.
And then he is impaled. Again. This time, on the tip of his own staff's metal shaft.
He watches the dwarf fall back, as if in slow motion. Toss the staff aside, with a metal clang that ripples into underwater echoes. And sink to his knees next to the Herald's body. Just as Felix sinks next to Alexius'.
He wants to reassure his boy, to comfort him, to explain... As he always does.
But as always, all his attempts are stifled by the encroaching darkness.
This fall into a pitch abyss, into searing, gut-rupturing agony, is already familiar... As is the tremendous gasp afterwards. And the sight of his note-strewn desk.
"Your dinner, sir. It's uh — "
"It's very hard to find fresh greens this time of year. I know; I know!" Alexius barks back, curling his fingers and crumpling some sliver of paper or other into his hot, sweat-slick palm.
He is so frustrated with himself that there is hardly any room for air in his tightened chest. He was so close — so bloody close!
But he... He is here once more. Back at the start of the same loop. It is beginning to feel a little unsettling, the way time magic has gotten a hold of him — but he is certain that if he does everything right, if he crafts the timeline the Elder One wants, he will be released, reunited with his son... and they will go home at last.
He just needs to make certain nothing goes wrong.
And he does — or he thinks he does.
He has the Venatori guards seal the secret passage.
He commands them to detain the Inquisition.
And instead of letting them manhandle the Herald, tossing slurs at her and turning her final moments into undignified slapstick (not that it will make much of a difference in the end, when her very birth is wiped from this timeline), he focuses arcane energy into two spells.
One is a gust of lilac smoke that zooms across the room and, drifting down to the Herald's feet, molds into a glyph. To hold her in place.
The other splits into pinpoints of scalding, acidic green light at the tips of his gauntlet's spiky fingers. In a swift, cat-like swat, Alexius claws out a portal for himself — a tiny spatial distortion, bleeding the same over-saturated green along the edges.
It's so easy to make, like tearing up a slip of paper. The Veil is exceptionally thin in Redcliffe, after all. A single step through the portal — and he is beside the Herald. Amulet on the ready.
"You are nothing but a mistake." He remembers what he said to her, before all these loops in time.
"You... You should never have existed."
Somehow, these words, once spat out with such livid, fiery rage, now crumble to ash on his tongue. The previous loop still haunts him: the splash of white hair across the floor, and the red smudges, and the kneeling, sobbing dwarf.
This stifles the conviction with which he made the same taunt before.
He... He thinks he made it with conviction. He must have! This is what the Elder One has always said about this Herald — this thief, this meddler, flaunting the sacred magic that she does not even understand. And he has always put his trust in the Elder One.
The amulet thrums, like a second heart on top of his robes. Eager; hungry.
Soon, it will be ready to use. Soon, he will finish his work, and time will stop looping.
The Herald glares at him, with an already familiar unspoken challenge. This is the closest look he has ever taken at her, closer even than when they talked at the Gull and Lantern. She is probably just a handful of years younger than him; perhaps round Fiona's age? Her winters and summers have already touched the corners of her mouth and eyes — all tightly set into a mask of steely resolve.
She has a strong, cleft chin, and most of her ceremonial tattoos — vallaslin, the appropriate term is vallaslin — are on her throat, not her face. An intricate lattice of thorny vines peeks out the collar of her robe: sturdy, simple, carefully sewn together from slivers of animal leather.
The throat is one of the most notoriously painful places to get inked. He is well-aware of that, for... personal reasons. That alone speaks volumes about her character. Not that any such volumes will ever be written, once he is done.
He lifts his amulet up. Its magic has not quite charged, but it will have to do. It will not be long before the glyph wears off, and he has already wasted enough time on pointless gawking.
But before he can begin... ending her, they are both distracted by an outburst of noise — cries, panting, the sizzle of magic — a few paces away. Alexius suspects shat he will see before he even turns his head. He has recognized one of the voices.
The dwarf — the red-bearded Southerner Number Five, who killed Alexius before time reset, and who keeps addressing the Herald with the elven word for mother — lies dead. With his head thrown back so that his beard points at the ceiling, in a forlorn charred wedge, and with several enchanted arrows sticking out of his chest.
He must he tried to get to Alexius again. But could not break through the rows of merciless white-clad archers.
The glyph melts away. The instant the Herald can move her legs again, she whirls in front of Alexius, scorching the floor where she steps. There are ribbons of fire wrapped around her forearms, twisting and undulating. Like golden serpents hungry for prey.
Alexius hastily puts up a barrier — but the serpents crash against it, once, twice, endlessly. The woman that commands them glares at him all the while, through the bubbling molten glass of his see-through summoned shield. Breathing heavily after each strike.
In her eyes, dark now, murky as the deadly green waters of a swamp, he sees something terribly, intimately close to him. He sees the face that has so often looked back at him from the mirror.
Is... Was that dwarf truly her child? Adopted, maybe, but as much her child as Felix is his?
Before too long, the fire melts the barrier, reflected in Felix's enormous, glassy eyes. And then it licks at Alexius' sleeves, and tastes his flesh.
A new kind of agony. It burrows through every inch of him, peels off his flesh in his by inch, fills his mouth and throat with the acrid smell of his own clothes burning, of metal inlays turning to white-hot liquid, of flesh hardening to charred crust.
Next, the air is clear again, and his body is whole, and the long-faced elven boy comes knocking on his door. A new cycle begins at his desk, and ends in the throne room, with a new painful death. Over and over and over.
No matter what he does, no matter how he circles around the Herald, like a hyena on the prowl, he still fails. He still falls. Sometimes, at her hand; sometimes, at the hand of one of her companions. He tries to prevent that a few times, by barking at the Venatori to kill everyone in the throne room except for the Herald.
But either they take his command too literally and dispose of everyone they get their hands on, including Dorian — in which case, Alexius has to watch his apprentice sprawl on his back, a splash of blood stretching into crimson spikes from under his head, as though crowning him. While Felix weeps beside him, his forehead touching the floor — and when he looks up at his father, his eyes are ablaze with silent accusation.
Or Dorian is spared. In which case, he manages to set the Herald free, with one spell or another. Sometimes he goes as far as to wrap one of her dead companions into a cocoon ghostly-purple necromantic threads, and then tugs and pulls like a virtuoso puppeteer, making the corpse shamble into battle to aid Dorian and the Herald. The clever, clever boy.
So, a few loops later, Alexius gives up on this mass slaughter. He would assume that after watching so many people collapse to his feet — bloodied, burned by magic, beaten into swollen ragdolls — his heart and stomach would harden, and he would calmly move on to handling the Herald.
But apparently not. With each rewind, these deaths — collateral damage on the path to his ultimate goal — somehow seem more and more barbaric.
So he lets the Inquisition live. In hopes that, this time, or this time, or this, he will be quicker than them.
He is not.
They end up killing him. Time after time. And most often at all, he is killed by that soft, timid red-haired dwarf, who flies into a berserker rage the moment Alexius lays a hand on his mother.
Perhaps, he ponders to himself, poking a crude tin fork at his cooling dinner (not even remembering what he yelled at the poor elf this time to scare him away). Perhaps the dwarf is the key. Perhaps by targeting him from the outset, instead of the Herald, I will get her to surrender.
This is what the Elder One did, a tiny, nasty voice adds, at the very back of his mind. Alexius is so startled by this intrusion, that he nearly retches his bland southern mush back into his plate (which, to be honest, he might have done either way).
But thankfully — because he really needs to stay focused on the mission, or this blasted loop will never end — the voice soon fades to silence. As does that faint, pulsing twang of fear in the pit of his stomach. Fear. That he will never escape this time trap; that he is doomed to go through failure, pain and death, without reprieve, without moving an inch closer to saving his son.
All nonsense, of course. He has this timeline under control.
And so he begins to plot anew.
