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The sun is still slumbering beneath the mountains when Fiona steps out of her room. Robes and cloak pulled tight around her, she quickly hurries along the battlements, breath puffing out in front of her as she makes her way to the tower.
Ice has skittered its way through the cracks of the stones and glints of it wink slightly at Fiona as her guiding flame wafts past. She wonders whether someone forgot to activate the warming sigils or her accomplice had left her own magical imprint on the stone.
The latter seems more likely when she steps into the tower. Even on the lower levels, there is a distinct taste of ozone and a certain tang of something electric that all inhabitants of the Circle could so easily get drunk on. Even now, Fiona’s nose begins to twitch as she breathes in the lyrium.
It is no coincidence the pair had decided to brew this particular potion before the dawn brought all of Skyhold’s residents from their bed. Fiona heads up the stairs, wincing when a particularly loud bang rips through the air, rattling the windows even in its aftermath.
The sight upstairs, however, is oddly serene. This comes as no surprise to Fiona though, as Vivienne’s workplaces have always been strangely organised and clean. An outsider would have thought the enchanter’s tools merely for display; any mage in Montsimmard would have told them that Vivienne’s bizarre neatness was simply to be expected, even when she battles against the arcane.
“Am I interrupting?” Fiona asks softly as she leans against the wall, watching the woman in her element.
Vivienne doesn’t even look away from the phial, eyes narrowed in thought. “No. Shall we?” she immediately goes on. Vivienne gestures to the station Fiona had prepared for herself the night before, crystal conduits already awaiting her.
Fiona removes her cloak and carefully drapes it over a chair. “You’ve prepared the solution?” she checks while she rolls up her sleeves.
Vivienne would never do something as passé as rolling her eyes but there certainly is at least a haughty sniff. “Don’t insult me,” she replies with a sharp look.
Still, she hands over the glowing phial. Fiona carefully takes it between two fingers, hand cupping the bottom as she carries it over. A pleasant warmth bloomed against her palm, the solution happily sloshing about inside before Fiona gently lifted it over the assembled crystals.
Painstakingly, the phial begins to levitate, slowly rising up into the air as each crystal awakens. Then comes the storm: arcs of sharp lighting begin to arch from the tip of each crystal, hitting the phial with blinding brilliance.
A barrier shoots into existence over the pair’s eyes, tinted almost with a strange amber glow that makes Fiona’s world turn murky and gold, like she’d slipped into a decanter of brandy.
“Has the Inquisitor specified how many she needs?” she probes, blinking furiously as she tries to adjust.
Vivienne, clearly suffering from no difficulties due to the barrier, arches one brow cleanly. “First focus on getting this to work, dear,” she points out before stepping away.
The pair quietly work around each other for several minutes, Fiona attending to the phial while Vivienne effortlessly prepares several more oddities.
The work of an alchemist had always been a mystery to Fiona. As a child, she’d lacked the patience for such an art. After returning from the Wardens, the sight of dead, rotting things kept within jars made her want to gag.
She wonders if Vivienne makes the experience pleasant somehow by imagining the heads of her enemies pickled instead.
A particularly violent slosh of the solution against the phial catches Fiona’s attention. She frowns, eyes narrowing as she adjusts the crystals slightly. Still, the liquid remains stubbornly smooth.
“What do you think?” Fiona calls.
Vivienne, midway through a task, merely angles her head. “Have you added the salts?” she questions. After seeing Fiona’s nod, Vivienne frowns as well. “This should be combining. Perhaps,” the woman starts only to grab something off the shelf behind Fiona, immediately more preoccupied with whatever stroke of genius she’d had than explaining it to Fiona.
A sudden stench of rot seeps into the air though and Fiona nearly retches. “A little warning perhaps,” she hisses, hand flying to her nose. The foul taste seeps into her throat, however, clinging to her insides like tar.
She wonders if that’s how it would feel when one’s calling finally took them.
Vivienne merely waves a hand dismissively. “Why do you think I brought the flowers up?” she evades, gesturing to the aforementioned bunch by the window. “Stand by them for a minute.”
Fiona does indeed do just that, albeit begrudgingly. The flowers’ scent does cover up the pungent odour. Oddly these are not the primed and proper bouquet worthy flowers though that Vivienne is normally drowning in, and the smell is strangely familiar. Sprigs of lavender, thyme blossoms, and hyacinth had been carefully but crudely tied together.
A slight sheen covered the petals, pulsing ever so slightly. Fiona remembers the preserved bouquets of flowers strewn around Montsimmard when the cloister gardens suddenly came into bloom, many becoming the base of the perfumes court mages loved to adorn themselves.
“There we are. We’ll leave that to stew for some time,” Vivienne tells her, breaking her sudden nostalgia. The other mage pauses though and her eyes fix on the blooms as well.
Fiona offers her a sad smile. “They are lovely.”
Vivienne says nothing for a time. She takes a step closer and runs a careful finger along one hyacinth bloom.
“Do you miss it?”
The question is asked softly, with greater gentleness than most would expect the mage to possess. Fiona is not most people. She knew the girl before the mask had been crafted. She had seen Vivienne with her pupils over the years, firm but never cruel.
Vivienne’s finger leaves the petal but the mage still does not meet her eyes. “I cannot stand it here, all this drab cold stone and endless rain or chill,” she confesses. “It reminds me far too much of Ostwick. I long for home, the sun.”
Something tightens in Fiona’s throat. She cannot say what upsets her more. That Vivienne could ever think of the Circle as something worth affection, or that Fiona cannot shake an odd longing for Montsimmard too as of late.
The sun has barely taken its first peek above the mountains yet and there are no eyes on them. Their enmity can wait until the day. “I miss it too,” she eventually lets slip. “More than you could know.”
Vivienne does not acknowledge her words but something seems to droop in the woman’s posture. “Take some when you leave,” she says though the mage oddly then offers a sprig of lavender to Fiona.
Fiona accepts it anyway. “Where are they from?” she asks, forgetting which cloister it had been that the botanists and chemists kept their blooms.
Vivienne smiles, hands placing gracefully on each end of the table. “You remember the gardens in the eastern cloister? How carefully the botanists would tend to those blooms, practically slaving away?”
Fiona offers a wistful smile of her own as she lifts the lavender. “How could I forget?” Vivienne waits until she takes a sniff of the sprig, delicate herbal notes drifting up towards her, before going on.
“I buried their ashes there.” Fiona’s bittersweet nostalgia shatters like a mirror thrown against the wall. “It felt fitting, that even their remnants would nourish their parasites of children.”
Vivienne’s smile is cold now. Fiona wonders if the woman takes some perverse, petty joy at the way her breath had caught. If she does though, Vivienne relishes little in the victory. The woman turns sharply on her heel and returns to the phial.
“You have spoken little of Montsimmard,” Fiona calls after her once she has regained her breath.
Vivienne’s knife cuts through some sinewy flesh with alarming skill. “It is none of your concern,” the woman rebuts and something shifts in her voice, a warning that Fiona is treading on dangerous ground that none have ever managed to successfully cross.
Fiona is used to sacrificial causes though. “It was, for many years,” she goes on. She has heard little of the fate of her former tower and such silence only makes her more fearful.
Vivienne says nothing though, gaze fixed downwards. Fiona would have assumed that the woman had simply moved on already, focused yet again on her work, but then she sees the slight shake in Vivienne’s wrist before she returns to her task.
Fiona puts a hand over hers, keeping the knife trapped against the table. “Don’t trap grief inside you. It will claw its way out eventually and leave a bloody, messy wake that could have been avoided,” she advises gently.
When Vivienne looks up, it is with more venom than all of the vipers in Orlais’ court put together. “Many a bloody, messy wake could have been avoided and yet here we are,” she hisses, face coming uncomfortably close to Fiona’s. “Monstrous and ruined.”
Vivienne’s rouged lips graze past her ear. “Try and come for what remains of the Circle, Fiona,” she challenges softly then, serenely even; is that not always Orlais’ way of things? “See if you have the stomach for it.”
Fiona pulls away with a shudder, looking at the woman in disgust. “Little turns it now, not after service as a Grey Warden,” she rebuts swiftly only to draw out a shining, stabbing thing of a laugh from the other woman.
“You’re used to killing things and moving on,” Vivienne corrects. Her smile turns sharper. “Alchemists linger. We pull apart corpses and decide what parts are worth wrenching out of the rotting mess. We create new life and greatness from destruction and decay.”
Carefully filed nails drag along the wood of the table as Vivienne returns to the cursed flowers, the ones Fiona cannot look at without tasting bile in her throat. “I can rebuild, Fiona. The only thing you know how to do is destroy,” Vivienne says then and her eyes turn cold. “Do you think you can dare to face the corpse of our tower like I have?”
Fiona says nothing for a time. She worries she might scream. Her anger has always been an explosive thing but it is her misery and regrets that have always threatened to drown her. It does not help that the ghost of one such regret now stands before her with hollow smiles and eyes that beg for Fiona to let the water take her.
She forces herself to swallow, eyes closing shut for a moment. “I hope one day you can wrest the bitterness from your heart,” Fiona starts before she forces herself to meet Vivienne’s eyes. “Before it consumes you entirely.”
She doesn’t dare watch Vivienne’s reaction. Fiona does not want to know if the words are scorned or accepted.
Vivienne is no longer her charge. She must make peace with that.
The pair do not say another word to one another as they finish brewing the elixir.
After years spent as a Grey Warden, it is rather difficult for something to seem shockingly violent to Fiona.
It is therefore a surprise then that a room full of gushingly pink flowers is such a grotesque assault on her senses. “Oh dear,” Fiona teases as she leans against the door frame. “Suddenly developed a passion for botany?”
The young mage who is the subject of such a question doesn’t even open her eyes. Draped dramatically against a chaise longue with her frothy skirts cascading off the blue fabric like sea foam, the young woman looks as if she is posing for some Marcel Poussin painting.
Well, she would if it was not for the scowl that stains her features as she waves her hand dramatically about. “Take as many as you possibly want and more,” Vivienne insists. “If I have to see so many shades of pink for another hour, I might actually blind myself.”
News travels fast, even in a Circle as large as Montsimmard. Especially when it concerns this particular mage as of late, Fiona has noticed. The young Marcher had only been in the Circle for just over a year and yet here she is, drowning in a duke’s affections to such an extent that the woman had begged her fellow mages to take some of the blooms for their experiments.
Fiona turns slightly to address her assistant next to her. “Alicent, if you would,” she asks, tilting her head towards the nearest set of blooms. It is a mercy that these ones are potted compared to the waste of the bouquets that had flooded Montsimmard after the Winterised ball. Fiona wonders if that is Vivienne’s doing as well.
As her assistant grabs several of the flowers and deposits them in the box outside Vivienne’s room, Fiona properly scrutinises her surroundings. The few times she’d glimpsed the mage’s rooms before, there’d always been an impressive amount of lavishness, even for a Montsimmard mage.
Such lavishness now seems practically austere compared to the gold that seems to drip from every corner of the room. “Not just flowers this time. I suppose having an official position comes with its perks,” Fiona lightly jests, turning back to look at the woman.
Vivienne actually grimaces. If this was any other day, Fiona would have assumed the younger woman was suffering one of her awful sinus infections. The poor Marcher seems to suffer them relentlessly since coming to Orlais.
“How blessed I am,” the woman drawls, fingers pinching the bridge of her nose. “The glare of gold to offend my eyes as well.”
Fiona frowns for a moment. She swallows down her next words when Alicent steps back into the room with an expecting look. “Alicent, take those down to the laboratory. I’ll meet you there later,” she tells the girl with a soft smile.
Fiona waits until Alicent’s footsteps have fully receded before she looks over at Vivienne again. “You don’t seem thrilled by this.”
The change is remarkable. A smile soft enough to pass for dreamy glides its way onto Vivienne’s lips and many a person would fall for the mage’s facade, this sweet, sugared flounce of a thing that hides all the steel underneath. “Don’t I? I’m simply tired,” Vivienne deflects easily.
Fiona knows how much of an outsider she is considered in regards to Montsimmard’s hierarchy. Although the First Enchanter had grudgingly permitted her the title of Junior Enchanter, the woman had made it clear that Fiona was not to intervene in Circle matters unless she wished to face the most grievous consequences.
Still, Fiona does what she can to shield those mages younger than her, Vivienne among them. Something about the woman’s gloom from earlier makes the hair stand up on the back of her neck. “Is this a match of your own making?” she starts with slowly.
Fiona takes a breath, tries to make the next words seem objective rather than fuelled by the fears of a girl trapped by a particular beast. She wonders whether Dorian’s widow had let all the count’s playthings go so easily. “I’ve heard many nobles enjoy collecting mages like pets almost, to create a menagerie-“
“I dislike sentiment,” Vivienne cuts in abruptly as she sits up.
Fiona blinks once, then twice. That had not been an expected cause of discontent. “Can it not be easily manipulated?” she probes. “I would have thought you pleased by the prospect of a duke in love with you.”
Vivienne has always been one of those people so filled with assurance, with easy confidence, that one forgets this is a young girl of twenty. That youth flickers briefly back into existence when she looks down at her hands, suddenly insecure.
In the months to come, such small fragments of humanity will be ground to dust.
Now, Vivienne does what many a young mage is prone to doing, leaning on an older mage in some pseudo ritual of kinship. “I do not enjoy feeling dependent on anyone else,” she murmurs and suddenly Fiona grasps the woman’s true upset.
Orphans did always learn self-sufficiency to the point of extreme isolation. “I understand,” Fiona says softly.
Vivienne’s mouth opens in the shape of a retort, no doubt an unsurprisingly cutting one, but her gaze flicks up. The woman pauses, head cocking slightly to the side.
“Yes. Yes, I think you do,” she agrees. Something shifts in her face, as if she’s adding to a detailed note from her extensive archive centring around people and their wants. Fiona wonders what her entry now says.
“The monstrosity of being seen,” Vivienne ruminates. “The terror of never being looked at again.”
One hand begins to toy with the edge of her skirt before Vivienne stills her fingers. It is remarkable how restrained the girl has become over the last year, a once loose limbed puppet now held back by dozens of strings and stiff bindings. “What do you think would hurt more?” Vivienne asks. “To be touched or never be touched?”
They both know either could be devastating. But Fiona thinks of a kind smile, hair that shone like spun gold even in the gloom of the Deep Roads.
“The latter,” she answers truthfully.
Vivienne leans closer. “Why?”
Fiona merely shrugs. “Because you will feel pain in this life anyways. Why deny yourself what little joy there is?”
Fiona has rarely stepped inside a chapel willingly. As a child, those in the alienage only went as an act of appeasement when their Marquis did nothing to chastise the Chevaliers visiting their streets with some frequency. In the Circle, the sisters merely demanded attendance and one could do little to refuse them unless they wanted to face substantial punishment.
After the Spire, Fiona had thought she’d never need to step inside such a wretched building again.
Yet here she is, making her way past the servants snuffing out candles and shuttering windows as the keep hunkers down for the cold night. Mercifully, not many more remain. The winter has begun to thaw, melting into that red spring of Drakonis, and it seems as if the worst has passed for the Inquisition. Halamshiral did not crumble into ruins, and Fiona’s former comrades were saved from themselves.
Not all escaped unscathed from the conflict though.
“What is it?” a voice snaps before Fiona has even opened the door properly. She pauses for just a moment before she steps fully into the room and lets the door shut soundly behind her. Vivienne’s head twists around. The woman kneels in front of Andraste’s statue, lit by melancholy beams of moonlight that only drag out the sharpness of Vivienne’s features even more.
Fiona pads closer and lifts the sole candle she’d taken earlier in an act of parlay. “I came to pay my respects,” she offers.
Some of the life drains from Vivienne’s face. “That’s kind,” she gets out stiffly, in a way that implies she has said little else since arriving back at Skyhold.
Fiona is not disheartened. She sits next to the woman and clicks her fingers once. The candle lights within an instant, wick consumed by a bright flame that becomes one of the many glowing offerings to their Maker’s bride. Fiona places hers carefully by Andraste’s feet.
Fiona can feel Vivienne’s eyes burning into her back. When she turns slightly so as to look at the younger woman, Fiona finds Vivienne staring blankly at her and yet the mage says nothing for a time.
Instead, she unclasps her hands. Fiona makes no comment on the red crescents that litter her skin. Vivienne picks up something small that glints alluringly through the cage of her fingers. A gold ring, stamped with Ghislain’s crest is then pressed against the base of the candle.
The job of a widow, Fiona realises with some sadness. How terrible it had to be, to conduct this rite in isolation and so far away from the man Vivienne had had to watch burn on a pyre only after having seen him fade away for years before.
“Do you know any prayers at all?” Vivienne asks unexpectedly. Her eyes do not open and her hands do not stray from their task, but this is clearly a woman who wants to be distracted from the grim affair that has consumed most of her evening.
“None in trade,” Fiona reveals easily enough. She does not tell Vivienne that ones she’d learnt in the alienage have long slipped away from her tongue as well; it is a truth she herself dislikes to think about. “Mother Bellise’s attempts didn’t stick. You?”
A bittersweet smile stains Vivienne’s lips. “Only standard ones,” she admits. She pauses, lips parting for a moment before she shakes her head. “Never in my life did I think I’d ever need-“
The sentiment is clear enough, even if Vivienne fails to voice it out loud. Never had the woman expected a time to come where she’d have needed prayers to succeed.
“I have spent too many hours in places like this as of late, wordless as I am,” Vivienne suddenly confesses. Her eyes are open now, dry yet heavy with so much. It is not dissimilar from the closeness of Fiona’s throat most days, that inescapable weight almost choking. Grief is always so difficult to dislodge after all.
Fiona bows her head. “As have I.” She does not say more. She does not need to; the ease with which both of them carry out these rituals prove the amount of dead they’ve had to care for as of late.
They sit in silence for some time, Vivienne conducting the rite with several more candles. No doubt many a noble had offered them in some sycophantic attempt.
“I heard the warden has left,” Vivienne says, breaking the silence.
Fiona looks intently at one of the flames, vision blurring over until she can only see lazy swirls and bulges of amber light. “Yes,” she replies simply, not trusting herself to say more. She’d watched Alistair leave from one of the windows of the library, staring at the glimpse of golden hair as long as she could before it faded into the distance.
It was a shade darker than Maric’s. Fiona wonders if there’s any other part of her that’s touched her son in a way she will never be physically able to.
“You watched him go,” Vivienne goes on surprisingly. “You did not try to say goodbye.”
Fiona turns her head slowly. Vivienne is looking at her and there’s something too calm about that face, the face of someone supposedly grieving and vulnerable, and yet Fiona feels like she’s looking straight into the jaws of some predator that’s deliberating whether or not to pounce.
“We never met,” she points out truthfully as she gets up. Fiona had done her best to never cross paths with him.
“Never?” Vivienne calls after her, even as Fiona goes to leave.
Something cold settles in Fiona’s heart. She turns on her heel, sees the woman watching her curiously over one shoulder. “The serving girls are still removing your duke’s ashes from your robes as we speak,” Fiona starts. Vivienne doesn’t even flinch. “Yet you still play this game.”
The younger woman merely shrugs, sighing before she turns back to the candles. “You say that as if I can step out of it,” Vivienne mutters, low enough that Fiona only just catches it.
The walls of the chapel start to close in. I want him to have a better life, Maric. Such a wish had always been naive but Fiona had hoped for it all the same.
“His eyes reminded me of you,” Vivienne offers and Fiona can barely breath, can’t accept that this truth that has never been acknowledged is being spoken out loud. “The way they would narrow and screw together, I’d seen it a thousand times across the room from me.”
Vivienne throws a look over her shoulder. “Most do not have such knowledge,” she goes on. A beat. “Ensure that they don’t.”
Fiona doesn’t dare to take a breath, expecting a trap to still spring, waiting for Vivienne’s shards of ice to spring up and spear straight through her. “Why?” she eventually chokes out. There is no reason for this clemency, not when the pair still stand on opposite sides of such a conflict.
Vivienne merely raises one brow. “I may be a court mage, dear, but not even we have an interest in Ferelden politics.” The other brow raises to meet the other as Vivienne tilts her head away, and Fiona thinks the woman might have actually rolled her eyes. “If it can even be called ‘politics’.”
The other woman falls silent. Fiona watches as she blows the last candle out. “Is it survivable?” she suddenly asks.
Some of the tension bleeds from Fiona’s shoulders. Instead, they become bowed down by that characteristic grief that she has carried now for too many decades. “Yes,” she says anyway. “Yes, it is.”
Vivienne finally stands up, albeit slowly. Her knees must ache after being pressed against the stone for so long. “Then thank you, Enchanter,” Vivienne offers. She strides past Fiona before she can even catch a glimpse of the younger woman’s face.
“You have given me more comfort than anyone else has these past few weeks.”
Fiona is not a woman made easily nervous. Staring down hoards of darkspawn rather affects one’s sense of what peril is. Being summoned to the First Enchanter’s office without a reason, however, is one rare thing that manages to make Fiona’s heart still beat so rapidly it almost becomes a continuous drone.
She shifts around in the chair for a moment, trying to put herself at ease while she attempts a smile. “You know, if you wanted to see me in private-“
“Do not joke.” Most mages of Montsimmard are delicate, pretty things, rather like decorated porcelain vases. First Enchanter Camille has always reminded Fiona of a blunt, stone like instrument, cold eyes boring into Fiona with little consideration for her comfort. “Such antics only irritate me, as you are well aware.”
The older woman drums her fingers for a moment, a calculated rhythm coming to a scheduled break before she finally blinks. “Shall I tell you very plainly what I think of you?” Camille offers with little trace of interest in Fiona’s response. “If Fereldan’s king hadn’t pronounced his gratitude towards you, I’d have sent you to the Spire rather than allow you to return here. You are a disobedient, selfish, wilful thing who thinks nothing of the tower.”
Fiona scoffs at that, sitting up. “You just described many of your charges,” she points out spitefully. She draws up properly, offering a cold smile of her own. “Shall we move this conversation to the hall so you may scold them too, or do you prefer to loom over us one by one?”
Camille’s stony disposition becomes impressively even more severe. “If you are referring to court mages, they are well aware of their limits,” she states bluntly. “They do not try to undermine the Circle authority, if anything they endorse it as they should-”
“They spout your propaganda and you reward them with a nice, golden ballroom, of course, how could I be so blind to your generosity?” Fiona interrupts, an incredulous laugh bubbling out of her throat.
Camille says nothing for a time. Fiona feels the axe move over her neck, hairs standing up as the silence draws on. “Have a care,” Camille starts eventually. Her next words silence Fiona entirely. “You have a recognisable face for now, true. But buried down far enough, no one will find you ever again. At present, I am the only one preventing that from happening.”
A knock at the door breaks both of them out of the exchange. “Yes?” Camille asks, waving the door open with a hand.
The figure revealed behind it is one Fiona has still not grown accustomed to. Dressed in the same samite and silks of the nobles most mages worked for, this woman is clad in robes sharp and striking, wrapped tightly around her torso, revealing a tiny waist. Then, blossoming out around her hips, is fabric slit to reveal impossibly long legs, covered in thigh high heeled boots.
Fiona’s gaze travels up, past the woman’s torso adorned in silver, the fabric once again cut away to reveal the woman’s décolletage. Like all nobles, this woman wears a mask, hers silver and delicately carved. But instead of the deathly, sickly visage of most Orlesians and their petite, curved frames, this woman is tall, imposing, magnificent, and most remarkably Rivaini.
Vivienne bows her head in reverence, graceful, elegant and yet so different to the simpering gestures made by others. This woman does not demean herself, nor does she seem to be afraid of being punished for a perceived slight. “Forgive me, First Enchanter.” Her eyes flick across Fiona and then back to Camille. “Council session begins soon.”
Camille offers a curt nod. “Very well.” She gathers a few binders and stands up, coming to join Vivienne at the door. She turns sharply on her heel to throw Fiona a look. “Are you not a Senior Enchanter too?”
Fiona starts up, following the pair up to the council chamber as well. What comes next is the bloodbath of a meeting she had been expecting; Fiona’s fellow Senior Enchanters have made no secret of their discontent at her appointment and have taken to making their unhappiness evident rather bruisingly.
The only mage who refrains from such a display does not do so out of sympathy, either. Twenty four, newly elected to the Imperial role, and wholly out of sync with the natural order of things, Vivienne seems as focused on getting through council meetings alive as does Fiona.
“You seem to have been rather vexing today,” Vivienne comments once the session has ended and they are heading into the antechamber.
Fiona merely groans, hand massaging the back of her neck; all the looking back and forth in meetings gave her more personal grief than any mortal wound she’d received in the past. “I think I’d take darkspawn over her,” she reveals to the younger woman, subtly gesturing to Camille. “They’d leave me more intact, blight and everything.”
Vivienne laughs. It’s a refined sound, different to that of the girl who’d come from Ostwick. Fiona wonders if it’s become natural to the woman yet, this altered way of being. “You still have breath in your lungs. The dancing not’s over for you just yet,” Vivienne goes on, touching one hand to her elbow in sympathy.
The mage’s eyes flick behind Fiona’s head, darting across the antechamber, and Fiona lets out another sigh. “They all looking at us?”
“People always look at us,” Vivienne deflects with a shrug. Surprisingly, she takes Fiona’s arm. “Come. I have a bottle from Val Royeaux that needs to be drunk and I refuse to share it with any of these vicious creatures out of spite.”
The pair end up on Vivienne’s balcony; in years to come, Fiona grows to expect a figure standing on another balcony, white fluttering robes glowing in the morning sun as she beckons an Inquisitor outside with an unimpressed look.
As often happens, the discussion turns towards Fiona’s time as a warden. Everyone in the tower has their own particular interest, with some mages desperate to understand the experience of freedom and others keen to only confirm just how squalid a life wardens often lead.
Vivienne’s interest, as always, is a tad too invasive. “It is fascinating,” the woman tells her with wide eyes. “Do you think-“
Fiona swallows her drink quickly, shaking her head furiously. “I will not let you cut me apart. Not even for science,” she immediately refuses. Vivienne opens her mouth as if to object and Fiona jabs a finger straight at her face. “Don’t try and tell me you weren’t considering it.”
Vivienne deflates a slight fraction. “It would only be a few incisions.” A beat. “A blood sample as well.”
Fiona snorts, taking another swig from the bottle. Vivienne is surprisingly uninterested in her own drink. “You alchemists are bloodthirsty things,” she teases.
The joke seems to fall flat. Vivienne stares blankly into space. “It must have been wonderful,” she says softly. “For your magic to be the least monstrous thing about you for once.”
Fiona, mid drink, frowns. “I don’t think magic is monstrous,” she corrects.
Vivienne gives her an odd look. “Of course it is. It gives us the potential to be monsters like no others,” she insists and Fiona realises the woman is actually confused that Fiona could think any differently.
Something shifts in Vivienne’s face. The woman now reminds her of those odd arcane contraptions some mages work on - Fiona sees the facade, sees each cog turn, and sees something different shift into place. It does not change the fact that she understands nothing of the meaning behind such calculated alterations.
“A sister at Ostwick told me that once,” Vivienne reveals, face turned to the moon. It is a rare thing for the mage to speak of her former Circle and Fiona dares not say a word in case Vivienne decides to break this odd confidence.
Vivienne stays silent for another moment. When she next speaks, it is as if she has some bitter taste in her mouth that she’s yet to be cleansed of. “She said, “You’re a weapon, Vivienne. Wishing won’t change that. The only thing people will do is fear you. The sooner you accept that, the quicker you will make peace with this life”.”
Fiona manages to swallow, an uncomfortable sensation that makes her feel as if a stone has lodged itself in her chest. “Did you?”
Vivienne shrugs lightly, as if merely discussing something trivial. “With my magic perhaps. It has given me opportunities I would have never had otherwise.” She offers Fiona a truly chilling smile then. “Who cares if I am unloved so long as I am known?”
There is so much woven into those words, decades of resentment and grief that no person should have experienced this young in life.
“It’s the rest I could do without. Magic, magic can at least be a tool. But this?” Vivienne goes on, gesturing to herself. “Being a woman is enough of a disappointment, but a foreigner as well.”
She laughs again. The sound is so sharp it almost draws blood, slashing stinging blows against Fiona. “I must be the most despised person in court. An achievement, to be sure.”
Fiona licks her lips nervously. “An Empress rules over us,” she points out slowly.
Vivienne actually rolls her eyes then as she grabs the bottle away from Fiona. “You have never been to court, you would not understand what a disadvantage it is,” she dismisses easily before drinking herself.
Fiona leans in, arms crossing over her legs. “I did not know having a certain appendage gave you an advantage in the game.”
Vivienne seems to have lapsed into another isolated space of contemplation again. It has become increasingly frequent as of late, for the woman to separate herself from all. “I think, when I die, that will be the first of many questions I have for Him.”
The words make Fiona feel as if she’s been dropped into an icy bath, every part of her stiffening up as she goes into shock. “What?” she manages to get out.
“Why tease women with the notion of power, when it is only men given the right without question to shape the world?” Vivienne elaborates.
This woman is dressed in so much gold that she actually glows in the moonlight. And yet there is such a hunger in Vivienne’s eyes, an urge to devour everything within reach and Fiona wonders if the woman will ever be satisfied.
“You long for it, for so many things,” she breathes out. “How do you cope with such an ache?”
Vivienne’s gaze flicks down towards her feet. “I don’t. I indulge it best as I can and pray it will be enough,” she divulges shortly.
“Is it?” Fiona presses.
Vivienne hesitates only for a second before allowing her shoulders to slump. “Maker, no,” she confesses. “One is never satisfied. Success blooms like a sweet flower only to decay and wither away within days. Soon you are filled with those rotting, sickly saccharine corpses.”
“So why don’t you stop?”
Another silence falls. Vivienne’s eyes remain adamantly fixed onto her shoes. “I think, if I dared to stop,” she begins slowly, “that rot would devour me alive. Even now I feel partially eaten, half lost. The girl from Ostwick was gorged on and swallowed within days.”
When Vivienne looks up, it is with such a strange smile, all irregular and open - Fiona’s reminded of the moment one lifts the bandage and is met with a gaping wound. “You look at me with such horror. It’s glorious.”
“You are so young,” Fiona breathes out. “You need not go down this path any further.”
Vivienne merely shakes her head. “Only a fool would turn away. Admit it, despite your pretences otherwise, you find yourself just as drawn to power as I am. Only you struggle to obtain it.”
Then, something strange warps the woman’s face. Fiona realises Vivienne is suppressing a laugh. “What is so amusing?” she probes, still wary of the other mage’s macabre mood.
“I am all you could be and you are all I might have been,” Vivienne croons, as if it is some victory.
“I don’t think I could ever do what you do.”
Vivienne’s smile turns sharp again, something that threatens to demand blood. “So did I.”
"Approximately five,” Vivienne announces as she strides into the war room, coat immediately thrown onto a nearby chair.
Fiona, Josephine, and Dorian all look up from the reports and yet Vivienne’s eyes seem to be fixed on her. “I’m sorry?” Fiona offers, utterly lost as to what Vivienne was referring to.
Vivienne violently adjusts each of her sleeve cuffs and Fiona thinks she hears Josephine actually squeak, hand fluttering to her mouth. “The number of occularum we find in any area afflicted by significant Venatori activity,” the mage elaborates as she places two hands on the war table, the movement alarmingly slow as if Vivienne was reining back some primal urge that threatened to burst out at any moment.
Fiona blinks several times, looking at the others to see if they had any other clue as to what Vivienne was driving at. “I see,” she eventually says weakly. “How was Redcliffe-“
“How many tranquil skulls do you think are now scattered across the continent, used in some grotesque ritual?” Vivienne interrupts and Fina’s heart skips a beat.
“What?” she gets out eventually.
Vivienne’s eyes narrow. “You didn’t know.”
Fiona moves forward, reports thrown to the table as she goes around the table to meet the woman. “Know what?” she questions, almost begging.
Vivienne merely snarls, batting her hand away. “Did you even think to look? Did you think to check?” she hisses and for a moment Fiona could believe Vivienne’s eyes had actually caught alight, blazing as they did. “Did any among your ranks?”
“Vivienne-“ Dorian tries only for Vivienne to silence him with a sharp flick of a hand.
“They kept the ‘failed’ attempts in a shack in Redcliffe,” Vivienne goes on and there’s a slight shake in her voice. Fiona tastes bile in her throat. How many times had she walked past the skulls of her former charges, unaware of their demise?
“It was all there, right under your noses. And you did not know,” Vivienne continues softly, as if that is not the most cruel wound she has dealt so far in this battle. Something drains from her shoulders though and the mage turns on her heel. “Excuse me.”
Fiona does not see the woman for some days after that. It is only a quiet word from Dorian in the library that has her hurtling towards the top of the mage tower one evening.
She could see the pyre already built all the way from the battlements.
Fiona hurries through the tower, bursting out into the open air and immediately she recoils as she sees the bone white that sprawls across the dark pyre. “Are those-“
Vivienne doesn’t even turn around. “They deserved to be given their last rites,” she says stiffly as she lifts another skull onto the pyre. Fiona counts sixteen so far. “They will not have even that taken from them.”
The winds threaten to steal Fiona’s cloak from her, cold lashing her like a whip over and over again. “You brought them here,” Fiona probes and this finally earns her a direct look from Vivienne, dark as it is.
“Many did not choose to go to Redcliffe,” she states coldly. “The winds here will carry them far and wide.”
Her hands shake as she adds another skull to the pyre and Fiona darts forward. “Let me help,” she begs only for Vivienne to flinch away from her touch.
The younger woman shakes her head. “You’ve done enough,” she hisses, arms wrapped around herself as if soothing herself like a child.
I raised you, Fiona wept bitterly inside. I raised many that you now burn, let me carry them one last time as a mother should.
She does not try to help again. Instead she merely watches as Vivienne adds the last skulls to the pyre. “It was all there, right under your noses,” Fiona repeats, Vivienne’s words coming back to her suddenly. “And you did not know.”
Something hardens in her heart then. She thinks of Kirkwall, of the White Spire. “You are not the only one who despairs over the dead buried under the floorboards, Vivienne.”
Vivienne does not reply. Instead her arms sweep wide, fingers splaying out, and something rushes out of her palms. The pyre easily bursts into flames and Fiona winces at the sudden brightness. Still, she draws closer, tilting her head respectfully to the pyre.
“The Inquisitor is looking for those shards then.”
“Yes.” The word is said so roughly that Fiona almost wonders if Vivienne had cried beforehand, throat hoarse with grief now.
Fiona pauses for only a moment. “Whatever the final result, it will not be worth it.”
Vivienne’s face goes blank. “No, it won’t be,” she concedes several moments later anyways.
Fiona faces the pyre yet again, laying her palm against her chest. “Dareth shiral. Ir abelas,” she murmurs as she stretches her arm out in a final farewell.
Vivienne’s eyes narrow. “What elven prayer was that?” she interrogates and Fiona’s temper finally breaks free of its leash.
“It was no prayer. But an apology.” She steps away, robes snapping behind her. “You should try it.”
“Glory requires sacrifice. Stability cannot entertain chaos,” Vivienne hisses from behind her and Fiona stops dead in her tracks.
She turns slowly, meeting Vivienne’s eyes. “The lives of my charges and of those that came before them have brought no glory,” Fiona says softly. “Just more of the same pain.”
Fiona lets out a breath. “One day I hope you realise that the only thing still keeping you in that tower now is you.”
She leaves the mage there with the burning pyre. She wonders whether Vivienne stays until the last of the ash is blown away or if she can’t bear to watch the pillar of smoke stretch across the sky just like Fiona can’t.
The slimmest margin.
By the slimmest margin Fiona had won the vote to become First Enchanter. It is a fact no one lets her forget but she cares little for their slights. The potential of becoming First Enchanter had been something she’d never imagined, never considered while Camille was alive.
An unexpected death - in Orlais, Fiona supposes those are to be expected perhaps - leads to unexpected solutions to a leadership crisis, however, and Camille’s replacement was thus chosen by a vote rather than the ordinary selection process.
Her majority does nothing to quiet the brunt of the other major faction’s discontent. Headed by practically every other Senior Enchanter and influential templar, Fiona has grown used to seeing most around the tower staring daggers at her whatever chance they got.
Still, she does not rush as she makes her way through the tower, calmly ambling through one cloistered garden and into another staircase. By the time she’s reached the antechamber, she is even whistling a little jaunty tune.
Such mirth drains away when she sees the venomous gazes of her colleagues waiting inside already for her. Still, they begrudgingly get up.
Only one does not get up. The woman turns her head a mere fraction, fingers elegantly poised around the rim of her goblet. “We’ve been here for some time,” Vivienne drawls before she lazily lifts the cup up to her lips.
Fiona shrugs, not that the woman can see it. “There was an issue with one of the apprentices.”
A cruel laugh escapes the younger woman. “It is Junior Enchanters who are concerned with the mundane tasks of the tower. We look to you for leadership on slightly more pressing matters, dear.”
Vivienne finally stands up though. “But enough. Let us go in,” she says, as if she is the one who commands people in this room. Frustratingly it does look as if the other Senior Enchanters follow Vivienne into the council chamber.
Fiona does not hold onto such frustration for long though, as it’s soon replaced by another equally vexing one.
“It can’t be done,” Jonquil tells her in a complete fluster, eyes bulging out of his head like some ridiculous fish being squeezed. Fiona can’t deny she’s felt the urge many a time to give him such treatment.
“Why? she asks bluntly, fingers tapping against the arm of her chair.
“We have long enjoyed ties with the Marquis and his ancestors,” the elderly mage tells her, drawing up as if catching the wind in his sails. Fiona inwardly groans, expecting another one of the man’s extraordinarily long lectures. “To cut them off would be an offence and who knows what consequences could follow.”
“I quite agree,” a voice calmly interjects. Fiona can’t hide her scowl this time.
“Oh? Do share your thoughts, Enchanter Vivienne, you normally need no prompting to do so,” she snaps, fingers dropping all rhythm and instead clawing at her seat’s arm.
She hates how easily the woman can smile at her, how she can no longer discern a single authentic flicker of emotion in those eyes. “Negotiations with the nobility may now be part of your duty, but it is what your predecessor entrusted to me ,” Vivienne reminds her firmly. “I know better than most how badly the Marquis would take such a slight and his retaliation would damage the tower extensively.”
There’s an elegant roll of her shoulders, the kind a skilled puppeteer would be able to make his marionette do. “Better to agree to his requests and simply cut funding elsewhere,” she suggests simply.
“An excellent suggestion,” another Senior Enchanter cuts in, eyes glittering, and Fiona’s heart drops. “Any ideas?”
“How about that little Hyrell practical, hm?” Isadora, an old rival classmate of Fiona’s, suggests. Her smile is more lethal than any poison Fiona has had the misfortune of encountering. “Those mages have been working on that theorem for years and no economic benefit has emerged.”
“It is a pursuit of science-“
“One that has failed, time and time again,” Vivienne interrupts Fiona with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Some difficulties are to be expected, but this tower does not have the funds to entertain the foolish fantasies of the inept.”
She throws Fiona a pointed look. “Your patronage of your former apprentices, while understandable, is hardly sustainable.” Before Fiona can even try to deflect the personal attack, Vivienne raises her hand. “All in favour?”
They all are, as is to be expected, and Fiona tries not to rip her hair out, fists curled into balls as she stands up. It was the last point in their meeting and she has no intention to stay a moment longer than necessary; she worries that she might claw Isadora’s pretty eyes out of her head.
“One other matter,” Jonquil’s reedy voice swells up like some abominable weed. Fiona stifles a groan and slowly sits down. “Revered Mother Bellise wished us to discuss the current state of court liaisons.”
Fiona blinks several times, before her head cocks slightly to the left. “I don’t follow,” she eventually admits.
Jonquil’s eyes noticeably flicker across the room, towards another’s seat. “Many young mages, keen to follow in…another’s infamous footsteps,” and Fiona sees Vivienne slowly draw up, face stiffening into a blank expression, “have taken to throwing themselves rather publicly at whatever noble they can find. Doing so is in direct violation with the Chantry’s practices-“
“Mages have always done so,” Vivienne cuts in. “Perhaps somewhat more discreetly but all knew it. Why question it now?”
Perhaps the day is looking up. Jonquil’s lecturing eyes seem keenly fixed on her opponent. ““Your arrangement with the Duke was an anomaly, Madame. One that Camille should never have entertained-”
“And yet she did. We all know why,” another Senior Enchanter cuts in, this one a court mage himself. “No doubt the First Enchanter will see the benefit in allowing such partnerships to continue.”
Indeed, barely any of the other mages seem to be paying attention to her expected verdict, more fixated on calculating just how much Jonquil is beginning to sweat under Vivienne’s cold stare. Something snaps inside of Fiona.
“I see no reason why I should,” she says simply and it is as if a despair demon has materialised in the room, freezing everyone with her howling, lacerating bay of grief.
Very slowly, Vivienne turns her head to look at Fiona. She lifts one finger, barely. “Leave,” she tells the others softly and yet they all run to do so. It is only when they have all abandoned the room that Vivienne gets up from her chair and some of her rage starts to bleed through the holes of her mask.
“Should I remind you quite simply how the world works?” she snipes, arms folding as she draws closer.
Fiona dismisses her with a gesture, getting up herself. “Nobles have been feeding on young, desperate mages like parasites for far too long,” she spits out to the woman, trying to move past her; she has no intention to be lectured by Vivienne of all people.
Vivienne’s hand latches onto her arm, keeping her there. “You think we court mages don’t know the risks?” she hisses into Fiona’s ear. “But we choose to enter the fray regardless. There is no glory without sacrifice, no victory without wounding.”
“It is an illusion of choice within a world of entrapment,” Fiona snaps back, dragging Vivienne back so as to look at her straight in the eyes, to look the viper in the face. “Who can blame them for seeking a golden, airy cage? But it is our job as leaders to ensure their safety.”
“It is also our job to ensure that this Circle runs, that it remains powerful, influential,” Vivienne immediately deflects. “Mages are not just our charges, they are a vital part to this tower’s economic prospects-“
“Fuck the tower!” Fiona yells. “I will not let mages under my care fall prey to such danger. I may not have saved you-“
Vivienne’s eyes widen a mere fraction but it is the first time her mask has slipped unintentionally in years and Fiona’s words wither away on her tongue. “Saved?” Vivienne breathes out and suddenly there is such rage in her eyes. “You pity me? Me ?”
To be pitied is something sentimental, something that means one is seen as human, vulnerable. Vivienne looks as if such a thing physically repulses her, arm wrenched away from Fiona. “I have everything anyone could want in this world and more. You barely have control over your council,” she retorts, cheeks flushing.
She is embarrassed, humiliated even, Fiona realises. Vivienne can handle cruelty, indifference, begrudging respect. She cannot handle sympathy. “You hold power by mere threads and you think it is I that needs saving?”
“Yes,” Fiona replies honestly. “You have achieved much within this tower, true. But do you ever think of what you would have been outside of this tower given the chance?”
Vivienne’s hands latch onto her hips as if to prevent them tearing at Fiona’s face. “Why would I?” the other woman snarls. “That world does not exist.”
Fiona grabs her by the shoulders, almost shaking the other woman. “But it could! It could!” she insists. Something hot rises up through her throat, choking her, blinding her almost. “Why can you not see? Why do you wilfully blind yourself to it?”
That heat burns and prickles within her eyes before tears finally slip out. “We were friends once. Were we not? Or at least you trusted me once,” she says softly and something flickers in Vivienne’s eyes, something too soft to have survived unscathed in Orlais.
“Trust me now,” Fiona begs and then that light is gone.
Vivienne merely shakes her head. “Have you learnt nothing?” she laments as she removes herself from Fiona’s grip. “Trust no one but yourself.”
The last time they speak, Fiona finds Vivienne on the battlements as the night draws in, moon hanging over them like a bloated corpse. Vivienne’shead turns a fraction as Fiona draws nearer. “Well?”
“The divisions are complete. Your charges are free to take their half tomorrow when they leave,” Fiona informs her softly, coming to a stop by her side.
Vivienne merely lets out a hum of approval. The woman is already dressed in ornate robes, those often worn by Fiona’s predecessors in Cumberland, and Fiona knows the other mage’s course is set.
Still, she leans onto the wall of battlements. “Will you not even consider joining us?” Fiona asks, not daring to look over.
The expected reply comes. “No. I have no intention to join your pointless crusade.”
Fiona says nothing for a time. She instead watches the lazy flakes of snow falling from the sky; autumn has already come, and the stronghold is already subjected to the first caresses of winter. The wind slivers through the gaps of Fiona’s clothes, chilling her to the bone, and yet she does not move away.
They both know what this is. “So this is goodbye then, most likely,” Fiona finally says out loud, when it seems Vivienne has finally decided to keep her pretty mouth shut for once.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” the woman agrees neutrally. Another large gust of wind conceals any further shallow observations, making Fiona wince and fold closer against the stone.
When she stands up again, it is as if Vivienne has not moved an inch, still standing perfectly upright. Perhaps the woman has finally gotten her wish and become more statue than human, more inorganic than living flesh.
“I once was jealous.” The words are murmured so softly Fiona could have mistaken them for the tendrils of the wind’s cry.
“Of what?” she probes after several moments.
Vivienne’s eyes finally meet hers for the first time that evening. “You. It didn’t matter how loudly you screamed, how you raged, you remained standing, unbroken. Camille knew she could not mould you as the rest of us were.”
The other woman shakes her head then. “And then I realised how such defiance strangled you, strangled others, how roughly you were pulled back by your leash.”
Something bitter grows in Fiona’s heart, thorns sprouting inside the organ. “So you made yourself a loose one of gold and merely oiled it with our blood when it chafed at your neck,” she spits. When Vivienne says nothing, Fiona merely scowls. “Not even going to try and defend yourself?”
“I could ask the same of you,” Vivienne counters with a sigh. “But there is no point, nothing will change. There are no futures to dream of, no what ifs to be poured over. There are simply bodies to be burned and a question of how many more will be added to the pile.”
A grim silence emerges between the pair, both reminded of the toll of their conflict, their unwillingness to compromise to either’s demands. “Do you know, something quite strange happened the other day,” Vivienne suddenly says. “I was dining with some minor lord’s family and they brought in some venison.”
A beat. Fiona waits for the blow to land.
“The pyres had to burn for days to get through the bodies. It all smells the same, doesn’t it?”
There is something so ugly about Vivienne’s smile. All the beauty melts off like wax, revealing the ragged, broken edges underneath the mask that are begging to cut blood, the teeth that line a dark hollow of a gaping mouth begging to devour.
If Orlais could claim a vessel, it would be this gleaming, glittering husk of a thing desperate for blood.
“Do you enjoy it?” Fiona hisses. “Tormenting me with fragments of the horror of what happened there?” She has heard enough throughout her time at Skyhold to guess the fate of her former tower. The longer its tragedy lies veiled in mystery though, the greater the monstrosity of it grows.
Sometimes, when Fiona walks the Fade in her dreams, she wanders around a crumbling version of Montsimmard, calling out the names of all her charges. It ends differently each time.
She doesn’t know which is worse: finding the mages dead, slaughtered and lying in pieces across the library floors; or roaming that haunted place, screaming until her voice is hoarse and the dawn is coming, and she still never finds a trace of them at all.
“Hm, it’s like throwing knives at a lizard and watching it jump,” Vivienne tells her with some grim satisfaction.
“It was my tower too,” Fiona rebuts and something hardens in Vivienne’s eyes again.
“I don’t really care whether you grieve for it too,” she snaps. “I don’t really care about you at all anymore, except for how much more you will cost me.”
The orphan trusts no one except themselves, the alchemist becomes their own instrument. At some point, Vivienne had become the Circle, more tower than individual. Here she sat, stone skinned and with cold eyes, asking the demands of the enemy of her people.
I am all you could be and you are all I might have been.
When had it shifted? When had Vivienne become the woman in shadow, left in the past to rot and wither in bitterness?
“What I’m doing is for us all. I’m sorry you don’t see that,” Fiona tells her softly. “I’m sorry I didn’t stop you from this path. But my regrets can’t save you.”
The ugliness returns in Vivienne’s snarl. “There is nothing to regret. I’ve won,” she spits with the same ferocity as a child kicking over sandcastles with brute power, claiming an empty honour in a world that would not praise or recognise triumph.
“And what a hollow victory it is,” Fiona rebuts.
Vivienne pauses only for a moment. Fiona wonders what the woman is thinking of: her duke, her tower, or her own dilapidation. Something fractures in her face and the girl from Ostwick looks back at her for the first time in years.
“Perhaps,” Vivienne agrees softly as if that is not the most cutting blow of all. “But it is a victory all the same.”