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Chapter Seventy Three

"Tahlie!"

She sucked in a lungful of air and lunged upright, gasping as if she'd just burst up from the depths of the harbour. She choked, a scream bubbling up from within her, her body so icy cold that it burned; terror crawled through her veins like sludge, hysterical, uncontrollable, wild. There was a hand on her shoulder, and for a brief moment she nearly lost herself, reaching up to rip it away before common sense took over and she stopped herself. The room spun violently, and she wasn't even sure which way was up and which way was down, and her stomach objected to all possibilities.

"Maker's Breath, woman, easy! I thought you were about to claw my face off just then!"

The voice was familiar, and it grounded her, even as she lurched to the side and threw up, gagging at the bile burning her throat. Her head was throbbing, seething and writhing, violently cold light burning behind her eyes. And her head was so quiet, consumed by white fire but completely empty, no claws and no voices and no whispers and she could still feel every gouge they'd made, every scratch, the silence bouncing off every tear and wound-

"Easy, Tahlie, easy! You're okay now!"

She choked and spat, clearing her mouth of the last of the vomit, fingers clawing at the cold stone beneath her as if that alone could anchor her. The scrape of claws against stone as she did it was solely in her head… surely. Reaching up with a shaking hand to push her hair away and wipe at her chin, she stared down at human hands- scarred and trembling, but lacking claws at the very least. For the moment, whatever else she might be, she was human again.

With difficulty she kept breathing until her stomach settled and she slouched back again, hands planted firmly on the cold stone either side of her hips. The silence in her head was so loud that her ears were ringing. There was a fiercely burning ache between her eyes, so sharp that she wouldn't have been surprised if, upon touching the bridge of her nose, her fingers came back coloured with blood. "What…" Her voice broke. She shook her head, trying to dispel the noise. The ringing emptiness. "What happened?"

Garrett was crouched beside her, a scowl planted firmly on his face. There was blood on his clothes, new tears in the leathers he wore. She could smell the acidic tang of the demons, the ichor staining his arm like a splatter of ink. "I should ask you the same question," he said, wiping his blood splattered hand on his pants before reaching out towards her face. She flinched backwards violently, and his scowl deepened. "You missed a spot," he said, somewhat caustically, wiping at her cheek none too gently to remove whatever smear still remained. "Andraste's arse, you're freezing! And this is blood or something; did you run into trouble after all?"

She turned away from him, biting back the panic as she scrubbed frantically at her cheek with her sleeve. Maker, she couldn't ever remember it being this bad before, the cold. "There were flying books," she mumbled, her throat raw. She licked her lips and winced- they were icy. "And…"

And what? What could she possible say to him about what had happened in this room? Admit to facing down a demon again, especially one who had staked a claim on her body? Tell him that she'd possibly met a spirit in the same encounter- a creature of the loosest description masquerading as a friend, when it possibly wasn't? A creature that induced wild hallucinations, something that stole her body, something powerful enough to chase off even Adramelech?

Or the worst possibility of all, the possibility that there was nothing there at all; what if she was alone in her head, and all of it had come from within her? Justice and Anders had conversations, in a sense- the way Anders described it made it sound like a constant stream of engaging thought, unable to be ignored, persistent and always aware. It hadn't felt like she'd been having a conversation with a foreign being; it had felt like remembering something long forgotten, or waking from a dream and trying to snatch at the details before they disappeared like smoke in a strong breeze. Each little moment had been more like a sudden understanding, as if the answer for something she'd been striving for had suddenly appeared in her head.

And then the fragmented horrors in her head of Anders, and Justice, and a burning house in the dark of night. A woman screaming, men laughing, pain, so much pain… she could smell the rotting, living odour of the swampy forest as if she were standing there, the ash as strongly as if she had it clinging to her hair. She could still feel the crackle over her skin as Justice struggled to break free of Anders' control, the hint of lightning in the air that always heralded his appearance. The space between her eyes ached fiercely. She remembered the arrow, glowing brightly, a beacon of love as it hurtled towards… her? But none of it made any sense, because they were miles away, on secret business that neither of them would share with her. She had no idea what they were doing, or where, but her imagination had somehow concocted some vivid nightmare of them under threat by Templars?

Not a conversation, not a foreign presence. Not a vision, but a nightmare? A hallucination, perhaps? She hadn't felt assaulted as she had the many times she'd come into contact with demons. So what was it?

What would be worse? Tell Hawke she'd been assaulted by demons, or tell him she was terrified she was going slowly crazy under the weight of fighting the demons off?

"And?" he prompted, dragging her from her panicked thoughts. "There were flying books and?"

She stared at him, trying to cobble together something rational to tell him. "Nothing," she whispered, "they must have knocked me out."

He raised his eyebrows at that. "You'll have to try harder than that, Tahlie," he said, his scepticism making her wince and look away. "You're colder than if you'd spent a week sitting at the bottom of the harbour, you've got blood on you and most importantly," he spread his arms wide, "there are no books even close to where you're lying. If something hit you and knocked you out, where is it?"

Tahlie followed the motion of his hands, and looked at the clear circle that surrounded her. It was several feet across, probably as large as the circle of light that had burst forth to defend her from Adramelech. She felt her chin trembling, felt her grip on what was real and what wasn't slip ever so slightly. "Where are the others?" she whispered, trying her best to distract him. "Where's Aveline? Did you find Bartrand?"

"Oh, we found him," Garrett said darkly, "and half of the Fade in the meantime. Aveline is helping Varric to get Bartrand to safety. Somewhere away from this madness."

"What madness?" She could feel the tears burning at her eyes, and when one slid down her cheek, she gasped softly as it scalded her icy skin. "What do you mean? What happened?" Surely Adramelech hadn't set a trap for the rest of them, had he? A tremor ran through her at the thought of the demon hurting her friends in an attempt to get to her.

"The usual madness that always happens whenever I agree to help someone," Garrett said. "What should have been a simple late night beating turned into a gauntlet of demons and creatures and all manner of ghoulish fiends. And Bartrand, madder than a dwarven hatter, rambling and raving fit to raise the dead. Quite an eventful evening in all, and then I find you unconscious, colder than the grave… I'm not gonna lie, Tahlie, I thought you were dead."

She winced at the anguish in his voice. "I don't know what-"

"Bullshit you don't know what happened," he snapped, his voice loud in the empty house, "so don't keep talking to me like I'm an idiot. You all do it at some point. What was I supposed to do, what was I supposed to tell Anders, if you died? I didn't even know where you were! I thought you'd been… well I don't know what I thought, but seriously! You didn't need to endanger yourself, and yet I found you on the floor like that, and I thought…"

The tears burned in her eyes. "If you don't want to be spoken to as if you're an idiot, then grant me the same courtesy," she hissed, her breathing shallow as she fought not to just burst into tears outright. "You're not here to babysit me."

"And yet if I came home without you, we both know that there would be blood." He trailed off, angry but hesitant, and she dared to glance upwards quickly. There was a pained expression no his face, and he went to say something a few times before swallowing and managing "Please stop crying. I wasn't trying to upset you, I was just…" He trailed off in frustration, waving his hand ineffectively as if he was trying to elaborate on a point he hadn't even made. With a sigh he tried again. "It's not been a great night, and we could have used your help out there. Quite badly, actually. And I really wish you'd stop crying because I didn't mean to sound like I was accusing you at all."

"You don't trust me," she whispered.

He gave up with the crouching and dropped down onto the floor next to her, taking one of her hands in his own. "I try, Tahlie," he said, "but you make it really difficult."

Anger, white hot and fierce in her veins, welled up suddenly within her. "How inconsiderate of me," she snarled, "I didn't realise how much I put you out." She tried to tug her hand free but he kept a tight grip on it.

"Don't be an arse about this," he snapped back, rubbing her fingers as if he was trying to rub the warmth back into them. "You swing between this overpowered, over confident warrior woman and this broken, haunted creature and I can't ever tell which one I'm speaking to between one sentence and the next. I never know if you're going to try and kill me or collapse in a heap. You offered to come along on a mission that you knew was going to be violent, but then you vanish and I find you throwing up and crying in a back room. What am I supposed to think?"

"Whatever you want to think," she said, wiping the tears from her face with her free hand and wincing again at how cold her skin was. It hurt just to touch. Anger still simmered just below the surface, a strange sort of heat that battled with the ice in her veins. "There's nothing I can say that can make my actions somehow less suspicious." If anything, if I open my mouth I'll make things much worse.

He grunted in annoyance. "You could at least tell me what happened," he said, kneading at her palm. He cupped his hands around hers- so much larger, she noticed- and blew hot air into the gap. She shivered and let out a groan of discomfort, but didn't say anything. He frowned and kept rubbing at her icy fingers. "You know, you open your mouth, sounds come out, everyone smiles because enlightenment is bestowed upon the ignorant among us…" He trailed off pathetically and fixed her with the most wretched pair of puppy dog eyes.

She tried really hard not to smile, but Garrett was a persistent man if nothing else. "Maker Almighty, it's not as easy as you think it is."

"It rarely ever is, in my estimation," he said wryly. "No one ever just has something simple they want me to help with. No one ever wants to give me the whole truth, just the bits they think I can handle in the depths of my idiocy. No one ever wants to trust me, but they expect my trust in return."

There was bitterness in his voice, self-deprecation that she knew so well because she retreated to it so often herself. "I don't expect your trust, Garrett," she said softly, her anger fizzling out. "I've never given you a reason to trust me. I don't know why you keep trying, really."

The angry spark in his eye died out as well, and his smile was genuine again. "You missed 'depths of idiocy'? It's an ongoing character trait, I'm afraid, and let's face it- it's gotten me this far. And it's not like I could ever say no to a pretty face."

The comment seemed to come from nowhere, and her gaze snapped up to meet his. She swallowed uncomfortably. "Is that why you've stuck by Anders so adamantly?" she teased weakly, tugging her hand from his grip and instead tucking it under her arm. It didn't really do anything to warm it, but his touch was weighted with more than just friendship, the same unnerving intensity as when they'd first met and it made her feel ill. Garrett had been so preoccupied with the mystery she'd unwittingly presented, or so he'd seemed to be, and the few times that he'd touched her in less than platonic circumstances had stuck with her.

She didn't want his eyes on her, or his hands on her, and before she could think better of it she blurted out "There were demons here. I was trapped by demons."

She wasn't looking at him, so she missed the unhappy twist of his lips as he acknowledged her retreat from him. "Not surprising really," he said, leaning back on his hands, granting her the space her withdrawal from him warranted. "We found quite a few of them upstairs. Turns out Bartrand's idol, the one we found in the Deep Roads, drove him mad and there was all kinds of weird-"

"No, Garrett," she said, biting her lip, "Adramelech was here."

His silence was damning, and she kept her eyes fixed on the floor. "I think it was a trap for me, to get me somewhere where the Veil was weak, because I actually… saw him."

Garrett was silent for so long that she nearly broke, a sob rising in her throat as she fought the urge to beg him to speak. Anything would have been better than his silence- a condemnation, a reassurance, a mocking incredulity. Anything but the awful, ringing silence that echoed in her head. "Adramelech was here, in this room," he said, and she winced at how dubious he sounded. "And yet, you aren't possessed."

"Something happened," she said quickly, "a sort of- intervention. Protection. Like a spell, sort of. Like Samson has been teaching me to do."

"Well, what mystery is there, then? The spell worked, clearly, if you were able to-"

"I didn't cast it," she said, interrupting him yet again. She heard his intake of breath, felt the realisation settle over him as if it were a cloak settling over his shoulders, and she took a deep breath and finished. "It was too powerful for me to have cast. I can't… I'm no match for Adramelech. Not really."

She squeaked in alarm when she felt his hand clamp around her upper arm; she didn't fight him though, and she let him drag her to her feet. "As if the night wasn't bad enough, you let me sit here in a place where that thing," he spat the word, "managed to not only attack you but manifest physically? Tahlie, tonight has been a nightmare already and you drop that on me?"

Her head spun as she came upright, and she groaned weakly. "Garrett, I'm not-"

"Not what?" he asked, hauling her towards the door. She stumbled, and he didn't give her time to get her feet back under her properly, propelling her forward. "Not possessed? Not crazy? Not sitting in a house perched on a tear in the Veil as if nothing in the world was wrong, and we weren't at risk of running into a pride demon-"

"Adramelech isn't a pride demon," she interjected hollowly.

"I don't care what the fuck he is!" Garrett snarled, dragging her down the darkened corridor and presumably towards the exit. "I have no desire to meet him when you're this weak and I've spent the evening already fighting-"

That roused a fire in her. "I am not weak!" she snarled.

He stopped so abruptly that she ran into the back of him, oomphing at the impact. "You look like you've run to Lowtown and back half a dozen times," he said pointedly, speaking down to her in a way that raised her hackles even more. "You're shaking, and white, and you're radiating cold.  You're twitching every so often, and if I see your tatts start to glow, I am damn well knocking you out because I'm not fucking dealing with you turning into an abomination. I'm sorry if I'm confused as to the meaning of weak, but you are a text book example right now, sweetheart!"

She bared her teeth at him, just stopping herself from hissing at him. The anger was pulsing in her now, the same anger that Samson warned her about, the same reckless wildfire that she spent so much of her time avoiding. "Forgive me, I didn't realise that was such an inconvenience for you, my being attacked by demons. I'll try to avoid being so unaccommodating in the future, messere."

"There you go again, using fancy language again," he snapped. "An alienage in a lumber town isn't exactly the sort of place you learn to enunciate your words so precisely-"

Within her the anger grew, clawing at her, choking her. The darkness around them grew as well, the shadows lengthening. Garrett didn't notice, but she did. She was too far gone to care. "Don't presume to know what I did and didn't learn in my childhood, Hawke!" she snarled, stabbing at his chest with a finger. She didn't have the best balance, and her head was still spinning, and she wobbled a little. Garrett's hand snapped out, fingers wrapping around her elbow and steadying her. His hand wrenched away just as suddenly, and he cursed as if she'd burned him.

"Maker's Breath, get a hold of yourself Tahlie!" He was angry, just as angry as her, but there was fear there as well. He could see the changes, she knew it, why did he keep goading her? What madness was this? "It's just suspicious, that's all. There are a lot of things about you that don't measure up-"

"I hardly qualify as normal, Hawke," she snapped; her voice was layered, the echo underneath that was an ominous reminder of how far she'd gone.

"We're getting out of here," he said, not really an answer, not quite an accusation. It was a bit of both though- he was frightened of her.

He had a right to be.

The shadows were reaching out to her, long teasing fingers grabbing at her ankles, and breathing was hard, and something danced at the edge of her vision. He dragged her through the house, not pausing despite her weak protests; her breathing grew jagged, air rattling in her chest as if there was a band tied around it. Garrett fumbled at the front door for a moment, and then they were through, and she stumbled on the steps and fell to her knees and looked up-

"Maker, Tahlie, your eyes are black as pitch!"

She hardly heard him as she stared up at the sky, at the stars, steam rising from her skin as the midnight air proved to be warmer than her body. And something in the air, something in the damp, living air of the night broke through to her as she stared upwards, staring, thoughts racing, blood pounding, veins burning against the ice, and she realised what was wrong, what was missing, realised that the nightmares were perhaps not nightmares, that the hallucinations were a little more than-

"Anders is in trouble," she rasped, and then fell face down onto the stones.

Description
Chapter Seventy Three

"Tahlie!"

She sucked in a lungful of air and lunged upright, gasping as if she'd just burst up from the depths of the harbour. She choked, a scream bubbling up from within her, her body so icy cold that it burned; terror crawled through her veins like sludge, hysterical, uncontrollable, wild. There was a hand on her shoulder, and for a brief moment she nearly lost herself, reaching up to rip it away before common sense took over and she stopped herself. The room spun violently, and she wasn't even sure which way was up and which way was down, and her stomach objected to all possibilities.

"Maker's Breath, woman, easy! I thought you were about to claw my face off just then!"

The voice was familiar, and it grounded her, even as she lurched to the side and threw up, gagging at the bile burning her throat. Her head was throbbing, seething and writhing, violently cold light burning behind her eyes. And her head was so quiet, consumed by white fire but completely empty, no claws and no voices and no whispers and she could still feel every gouge they'd made, every scratch, the silence bouncing off every tear and wound-

"Easy, Tahlie, easy! You're okay now!"

She choked and spat, clearing her mouth of the last of the vomit, fingers clawing at the cold stone beneath her as if that alone could anchor her. The scrape of claws against stone as she did it was solely in her head… surely. Reaching up with a shaking hand to push her hair away and wipe at her chin, she stared down at human hands- scarred and trembling, but lacking claws at the very least. For the moment, whatever else she might be, she was human again.

With difficulty she kept breathing until her stomach settled and she slouched back again, hands planted firmly on the cold stone either side of her hips. The silence in her head was so loud that her ears were ringing. There was a fiercely burning ache between her eyes, so sharp that she wouldn't have been surprised if, upon touching the bridge of her nose, her fingers came back coloured with blood. "What…" Her voice broke. She shook her head, trying to dispel the noise. The ringing emptiness. "What happened?"

Garrett was crouched beside her, a scowl planted firmly on his face. There was blood on his clothes, new tears in the leathers he wore. She could smell the acidic tang of the demons, the ichor staining his arm like a splatter of ink. "I should ask you the same question," he said, wiping his blood splattered hand on his pants before reaching out towards her face. She flinched backwards violently, and his scowl deepened. "You missed a spot," he said, somewhat caustically, wiping at her cheek none too gently to remove whatever smear still remained. "Andraste's arse, you're freezing! And this is blood or something; did you run into trouble after all?"

She turned away from him, biting back the panic as she scrubbed frantically at her cheek with her sleeve. Maker, she couldn't ever remember it being this bad before, the cold. "There were flying books," she mumbled, her throat raw. She licked her lips and winced- they were icy. "And…"

And what? What could she possible say to him about what had happened in this room? Admit to facing down a demon again, especially one who had staked a claim on her body? Tell him that she'd possibly met a spirit in the same encounter- a creature of the loosest description masquerading as a friend, when it possibly wasn't? A creature that induced wild hallucinations, something that stole her body, something powerful enough to chase off even Adramelech?

Or the worst possibility of all, the possibility that there was nothing there at all; what if she was alone in her head, and all of it had come from within her? Justice and Anders had conversations, in a sense- the way Anders described it made it sound like a constant stream of engaging thought, unable to be ignored, persistent and always aware. It hadn't felt like she'd been having a conversation with a foreign being; it had felt like remembering something long forgotten, or waking from a dream and trying to snatch at the details before they disappeared like smoke in a strong breeze. Each little moment had been more like a sudden understanding, as if the answer for something she'd been striving for had suddenly appeared in her head.

And then the fragmented horrors in her head of Anders, and Justice, and a burning house in the dark of night. A woman screaming, men laughing, pain, so much pain… she could smell the rotting, living odour of the swampy forest as if she were standing there, the ash as strongly as if she had it clinging to her hair. She could still feel the crackle over her skin as Justice struggled to break free of Anders' control, the hint of lightning in the air that always heralded his appearance. The space between her eyes ached fiercely. She remembered the arrow, glowing brightly, a beacon of love as it hurtled towards… her? But none of it made any sense, because they were miles away, on secret business that neither of them would share with her. She had no idea what they were doing, or where, but her imagination had somehow concocted some vivid nightmare of them under threat by Templars?

Not a conversation, not a foreign presence. Not a vision, but a nightmare? A hallucination, perhaps? She hadn't felt assaulted as she had the many times she'd come into contact with demons. So what was it?

What would be worse? Tell Hawke she'd been assaulted by demons, or tell him she was terrified she was going slowly crazy under the weight of fighting the demons off?

"And?" he prompted, dragging her from her panicked thoughts. "There were flying books and?"

She stared at him, trying to cobble together something rational to tell him. "Nothing," she whispered, "they must have knocked me out."

He raised his eyebrows at that. "You'll have to try harder than that, Tahlie," he said, his scepticism making her wince and look away. "You're colder than if you'd spent a week sitting at the bottom of the harbour, you've got blood on you and most importantly," he spread his arms wide, "there are no books even close to where you're lying. If something hit you and knocked you out, where is it?"

Tahlie followed the motion of his hands, and looked at the clear circle that surrounded her. It was several feet across, probably as large as the circle of light that had burst forth to defend her from Adramelech. She felt her chin trembling, felt her grip on what was real and what wasn't slip ever so slightly. "Where are the others?" she whispered, trying her best to distract him. "Where's Aveline? Did you find Bartrand?"

"Oh, we found him," Garrett said darkly, "and half of the Fade in the meantime. Aveline is helping Varric to get Bartrand to safety. Somewhere away from this madness."

"What madness?" She could feel the tears burning at her eyes, and when one slid down her cheek, she gasped softly as it scalded her icy skin. "What do you mean? What happened?" Surely Adramelech hadn't set a trap for the rest of them, had he? A tremor ran through her at the thought of the demon hurting her friends in an attempt to get to her.

"The usual madness that always happens whenever I agree to help someone," Garrett said. "What should have been a simple late night beating turned into a gauntlet of demons and creatures and all manner of ghoulish fiends. And Bartrand, madder than a dwarven hatter, rambling and raving fit to raise the dead. Quite an eventful evening in all, and then I find you unconscious, colder than the grave… I'm not gonna lie, Tahlie, I thought you were dead."

She winced at the anguish in his voice. "I don't know what-"

"Bullshit you don't know what happened," he snapped, his voice loud in the empty house, "so don't keep talking to me like I'm an idiot. You all do it at some point. What was I supposed to do, what was I supposed to tell Anders, if you died? I didn't even know where you were! I thought you'd been… well I don't know what I thought, but seriously! You didn't need to endanger yourself, and yet I found you on the floor like that, and I thought…"

The tears burned in her eyes. "If you don't want to be spoken to as if you're an idiot, then grant me the same courtesy," she hissed, her breathing shallow as she fought not to just burst into tears outright. "You're not here to babysit me."

"And yet if I came home without you, we both know that there would be blood." He trailed off, angry but hesitant, and she dared to glance upwards quickly. There was a pained expression no his face, and he went to say something a few times before swallowing and managing "Please stop crying. I wasn't trying to upset you, I was just…" He trailed off in frustration, waving his hand ineffectively as if he was trying to elaborate on a point he hadn't even made. With a sigh he tried again. "It's not been a great night, and we could have used your help out there. Quite badly, actually. And I really wish you'd stop crying because I didn't mean to sound like I was accusing you at all."

"You don't trust me," she whispered.

He gave up with the crouching and dropped down onto the floor next to her, taking one of her hands in his own. "I try, Tahlie," he said, "but you make it really difficult."

Anger, white hot and fierce in her veins, welled up suddenly within her. "How inconsiderate of me," she snarled, "I didn't realise how much I put you out." She tried to tug her hand free but he kept a tight grip on it.

"Don't be an arse about this," he snapped back, rubbing her fingers as if he was trying to rub the warmth back into them. "You swing between this overpowered, over confident warrior woman and this broken, haunted creature and I can't ever tell which one I'm speaking to between one sentence and the next. I never know if you're going to try and kill me or collapse in a heap. You offered to come along on a mission that you knew was going to be violent, but then you vanish and I find you throwing up and crying in a back room. What am I supposed to think?"

"Whatever you want to think," she said, wiping the tears from her face with her free hand and wincing again at how cold her skin was. It hurt just to touch. Anger still simmered just below the surface, a strange sort of heat that battled with the ice in her veins. "There's nothing I can say that can make my actions somehow less suspicious." If anything, if I open my mouth I'll make things much worse.

He grunted in annoyance. "You could at least tell me what happened," he said, kneading at her palm. He cupped his hands around hers- so much larger, she noticed- and blew hot air into the gap. She shivered and let out a groan of discomfort, but didn't say anything. He frowned and kept rubbing at her icy fingers. "You know, you open your mouth, sounds come out, everyone smiles because enlightenment is bestowed upon the ignorant among us…" He trailed off pathetically and fixed her with the most wretched pair of puppy dog eyes.

She tried really hard not to smile, but Garrett was a persistent man if nothing else. "Maker Almighty, it's not as easy as you think it is."

"It rarely ever is, in my estimation," he said wryly. "No one ever just has something simple they want me to help with. No one ever wants to give me the whole truth, just the bits they think I can handle in the depths of my idiocy. No one ever wants to trust me, but they expect my trust in return."

There was bitterness in his voice, self-deprecation that she knew so well because she retreated to it so often herself. "I don't expect your trust, Garrett," she said softly, her anger fizzling out. "I've never given you a reason to trust me. I don't know why you keep trying, really."

The angry spark in his eye died out as well, and his smile was genuine again. "You missed 'depths of idiocy'? It's an ongoing character trait, I'm afraid, and let's face it- it's gotten me this far. And it's not like I could ever say no to a pretty face."

The comment seemed to come from nowhere, and her gaze snapped up to meet his. She swallowed uncomfortably. "Is that why you've stuck by Anders so adamantly?" she teased weakly, tugging her hand from his grip and instead tucking it under her arm. It didn't really do anything to warm it, but his touch was weighted with more than just friendship, the same unnerving intensity as when they'd first met and it made her feel ill. Garrett had been so preoccupied with the mystery she'd unwittingly presented, or so he'd seemed to be, and the few times that he'd touched her in less than platonic circumstances had stuck with her.

She didn't want his eyes on her, or his hands on her, and before she could think better of it she blurted out "There were demons here. I was trapped by demons."

She wasn't looking at him, so she missed the unhappy twist of his lips as he acknowledged her retreat from him. "Not surprising really," he said, leaning back on his hands, granting her the space her withdrawal from him warranted. "We found quite a few of them upstairs. Turns out Bartrand's idol, the one we found in the Deep Roads, drove him mad and there was all kinds of weird-"

"No, Garrett," she said, biting her lip, "Adramelech was here."

His silence was damning, and she kept her eyes fixed on the floor. "I think it was a trap for me, to get me somewhere where the Veil was weak, because I actually… saw him."

Garrett was silent for so long that she nearly broke, a sob rising in her throat as she fought the urge to beg him to speak. Anything would have been better than his silence- a condemnation, a reassurance, a mocking incredulity. Anything but the awful, ringing silence that echoed in her head. "Adramelech was here, in this room," he said, and she winced at how dubious he sounded. "And yet, you aren't possessed."

"Something happened," she said quickly, "a sort of- intervention. Protection. Like a spell, sort of. Like Samson has been teaching me to do."

"Well, what mystery is there, then? The spell worked, clearly, if you were able to-"

"I didn't cast it," she said, interrupting him yet again. She heard his intake of breath, felt the realisation settle over him as if it were a cloak settling over his shoulders, and she took a deep breath and finished. "It was too powerful for me to have cast. I can't… I'm no match for Adramelech. Not really."

She squeaked in alarm when she felt his hand clamp around her upper arm; she didn't fight him though, and she let him drag her to her feet. "As if the night wasn't bad enough, you let me sit here in a place where that thing," he spat the word, "managed to not only attack you but manifest physically? Tahlie, tonight has been a nightmare already and you drop that on me?"

Her head spun as she came upright, and she groaned weakly. "Garrett, I'm not-"

"Not what?" he asked, hauling her towards the door. She stumbled, and he didn't give her time to get her feet back under her properly, propelling her forward. "Not possessed? Not crazy? Not sitting in a house perched on a tear in the Veil as if nothing in the world was wrong, and we weren't at risk of running into a pride demon-"

"Adramelech isn't a pride demon," she interjected hollowly.

"I don't care what the fuck he is!" Garrett snarled, dragging her down the darkened corridor and presumably towards the exit. "I have no desire to meet him when you're this weak and I've spent the evening already fighting-"

That roused a fire in her. "I am not weak!" she snarled.

He stopped so abruptly that she ran into the back of him, oomphing at the impact. "You look like you've run to Lowtown and back half a dozen times," he said pointedly, speaking down to her in a way that raised her hackles even more. "You're shaking, and white, and you're radiating cold.  You're twitching every so often, and if I see your tatts start to glow, I am damn well knocking you out because I'm not fucking dealing with you turning into an abomination. I'm sorry if I'm confused as to the meaning of weak, but you are a text book example right now, sweetheart!"

She bared her teeth at him, just stopping herself from hissing at him. The anger was pulsing in her now, the same anger that Samson warned her about, the same reckless wildfire that she spent so much of her time avoiding. "Forgive me, I didn't realise that was such an inconvenience for you, my being attacked by demons. I'll try to avoid being so unaccommodating in the future, messere."

"There you go again, using fancy language again," he snapped. "An alienage in a lumber town isn't exactly the sort of place you learn to enunciate your words so precisely-"

Within her the anger grew, clawing at her, choking her. The darkness around them grew as well, the shadows lengthening. Garrett didn't notice, but she did. She was too far gone to care. "Don't presume to know what I did and didn't learn in my childhood, Hawke!" she snarled, stabbing at his chest with a finger. She didn't have the best balance, and her head was still spinning, and she wobbled a little. Garrett's hand snapped out, fingers wrapping around her elbow and steadying her. His hand wrenched away just as suddenly, and he cursed as if she'd burned him.

"Maker's Breath, get a hold of yourself Tahlie!" He was angry, just as angry as her, but there was fear there as well. He could see the changes, she knew it, why did he keep goading her? What madness was this? "It's just suspicious, that's all. There are a lot of things about you that don't measure up-"

"I hardly qualify as normal, Hawke," she snapped; her voice was layered, the echo underneath that was an ominous reminder of how far she'd gone.

"We're getting out of here," he said, not really an answer, not quite an accusation. It was a bit of both though- he was frightened of her.

He had a right to be.

The shadows were reaching out to her, long teasing fingers grabbing at her ankles, and breathing was hard, and something danced at the edge of her vision. He dragged her through the house, not pausing despite her weak protests; her breathing grew jagged, air rattling in her chest as if there was a band tied around it. Garrett fumbled at the front door for a moment, and then they were through, and she stumbled on the steps and fell to her knees and looked up-

"Maker, Tahlie, your eyes are black as pitch!"

She hardly heard him as she stared up at the sky, at the stars, steam rising from her skin as the midnight air proved to be warmer than her body. And something in the air, something in the damp, living air of the night broke through to her as she stared upwards, staring, thoughts racing, blood pounding, veins burning against the ice, and she realised what was wrong, what was missing, realised that the nightmares were perhaps not nightmares, that the hallucinations were a little more than-

"Anders is in trouble," she rasped, and then fell face down onto the stones.