Chapter Text
Maker, my enemies are abundant.
Many are those who rise up against me.
But my faith sustains me; I shall not fear the legion,
Should they set themselves against me.
“Should have taken the ox,” says the Venatori, looking down at Dorian with a furrowed brow. A lined face and greying hair, a prominent scar on his jaw. Dorian's hands are bound, and the magebane tastes bitter on his tongue, doing little to mask that they made him bleed, hitting him to make him swallow it.
He's collared, too. It's all a little excessive. Or perhaps his reputation proceeds him so much they don't trust a collar or magebane alone to do the job of keeping his magic at bay.
“Did you see the size of it?” another Venatori scoffs, as he sharpens a knife on a whetstone nearby. Wiry and hollow-faced, hair shaved short and army tattoos on his neck. Snakes and swords. “Wait, which one? Their Inquisitor, or that merc they've got, primus?”
“Either,” the first – the captain – sounds disappointed. “Though, I'd hoped I'd get to break the big one. We'd have had to deliver the Inquisitor in one piece, but we could have cut pieces off that big ox for weeks before it died.”
“My brother says their horns are potent,” another says. The same short-shaved hair and army tattoos as the one with the knife, but taller, wider, with ears deformed from repeated damage.
“Your brother is an idiot, Hugo,” the captain says, rolling his eyes. “Those horns would have fetched a good price, though, because of idiots like your brother.”
Dorian can't help but growl at them for talking so casually about hurting his friends.
“What do you think, Pavus?” the captain says coolly. “I've heard how you're inclined. Heard all sorts coming out of the Inquisition, too. How potent is he, that ox?”
Hugo guffaws.
“As if even a traitor would fuck those animals!”
He says nothing, though they haven't gagged him. But magebane is spiked with something, and nothing seems as clear as it did ten minutes ago.
“We going to ransom him?” Hugo asks.
“Probably. I'm sure his father would be useful, with the right leverage.”
“Or we could just sell him, right? The fighting pits always need someone who can put on a show.”
I shall not fear the legion, Dorian thinks, should they set themselves against me.
The one sharpening the knife makes a disappointed sound. “That's no fun. You promised us fun, Laurus.”
“I'm open to suggestions,” Laurus says, as casually as if they were discussing dinner plans, as he watches Dorian on his knees. Dorian holds his gaze, unwilling to submit under his stare.
“Let's take his skin off!”
“Velius, please. He must stay recognisable.”
“You'd let me take the ox's skin off.”
Dorian can't help the downturn of his mouth at the image that conjures of the Bull flayed. Laurus narrows his eyes at him, and Dorian rather thinks he's made a mistake – the other two are distracted and stupid, but Laurus has a clever face, and an observant gaze.
“Gone soft on the beasts, have you? Your perversions aside, I'd not heard anything to suggest you were a fool. You can't think those animals can be any ally of yours.”
“You and the rest of the Venatori are the fools.”
It's not as much wit as he'd liked to be able to muster, but it'll do. It's enough to get a reaction.
“Strong words, coming from the man on his knees, a traitor to his country, an enemy of the Imperium.”
“You're the enemy of Tevinter,” Dorian says, allows himself a small laugh with it. “The poison rotting her from inside. Not the Qunari.”
Laurus makes a thoughtful noise.
“Are they a kind breed? Do you think they drug their mages before they mutilate them? Velius, you were going to try this on the ox, yes?”
Dorian feels lead settle in his gut.
“You said he had to be recognisable,” Velius says, but he's got to his feet, sounding hopeful.
“Well if you can promise to do it with a little care...”
“Oh, yes! Let me get my tools!”
Dorian used to have dreams about this. The Qunari were the stuff of nightmares, and then of the kind of stories teenagers told each other to shock and scandalise, and then of rumour and speculation. While the image of strong, brute-ish qunari holding him down and ravishing him quite quickly became a staple of his fantasies, being collared and silenced remained a nightmare.
It hurts more than he imagined.
Laurus holds him down on the floor with magic – at least, he will think later, at least it kept him from thrashing and tearing his lips in struggle. Dorian tries to reach his own magic, but the magebane makes it impossible, and even if it leaves him hazy, the pain is clear and true.
“Seen a Qunari mage corpse once,” Velius says, as he makes a start. Dorian gasps at the sharp pain of a huge needle puncturing at the corner of his mouth, as Laurus and Hugo look on with interest. “Nasty stuff. Always wanted to try it out. Don't know why they use thread, though.”
Velius is eager but calm, humming a tune as he sews a length of thin metal wire through the skin above and below Dorian's lips, a continuous thread. Torture appears to be this man's craft, and he doesn't hesitate, pierces holes in Dorian precisely, pulls the thread tight as he goes. Ridiculously, Dorian is grateful for his steady hand.
Dorian can do nothing but breathe, so he breathes, tries to make them long, steady breaths. He swallows down the blood that pools in his mouth. He prays.
When I have lost all else, when my eyes fail me—
He can't even struggle, can't scream against the pain without making it worse.
And the taste of blood fills my mouth, then—
“Fine work,” Laurus says, when it's over, when they release Dorian's body back to him and he lies limp on the stone, with blood creeping down over his cheeks.
“How we going to feed him?” Hugo asks. “If we're keeping him to ransom, how we going to feed him?”
Velius pinches Dorian's nose closed, sending him into blind, fighting panic. He's weak, and held down easily even without magic.
Draw your last breath—
Even though his lips are sewn together, there's enough give to draw a sliver of cold air in, filling his lungs impossibly slowly as the metal thread pulls at his blooded, punctured lips.
“If he can breathe, he can drink. Let my stitches stay a few days, at least?”
Laurus waves his hand dismissively, and Velius removes his fingers from Dorian's nose.
I cannot see the path, perhaps there is only abyss. Trembling, I—
*
He has no idea how long he's been unconscious, when he finally comes to. His captors have made use of one of the cells and left him in it. As he peers down the line of them – two rows of cells, lining the walls of a long corridor leading to a doorway – it would seem his is closest to where the Venatori are camped out, and one of the few without skeletal remains in them. How good of them.
It's cold enough that the breath from his nose comes out as steam. Across the room, that which might have once been a jail, or from the layout of it perhaps a kennel, the Venatori are gathered around a fire, drinking wine. Pilfered from a cache in the dungeon they're in, he gathers, as he listens. It's mostly small talk about drunken escapades, the sort of thing Dorian would talk about with his own comrades.
It would always be easier if a willingness to mutilate another person was the mark of a monster than of a mere man.
He catalogues his body; his mouth aches, worse with even the slightest movement of his lips, though the blood has dried. His hands are bound in front of him and he's still collared, a heavy padlock at his throat. He's still fully dressed against the cold and they haven't stripped his armour off him, though his staff and knives are long gone.
“Do you think the Inquisitor will look for him?” Hugo says.
Laurus swigs from his bottle of wine. “She might. They're not a loyal breed, though. The oxmen on Seheron would never barter for captives, never stage rescues.”
“But we could still get her, couldn't we, if we used him as bait?”
He makes a noise of consideration. “She would be more valuable than Pavus. Might get our hands on that big ox, too. Take his horns, they'll fetch a good price.”
“Geld him,” Velius says eagerly.
“We could sell his cock!” Hugo cackles.
“You leave leave the cock, idiot. Nobody'll buy a slave that can't hold his piss.”
Dorian crawls across the cell floor, though it isn't very far to go to get to the front bars, marginally closer to the warmth of their fire, just inside the light it casts. His pauldrons knock against the stone, cloth rustles and buckles jingle as he settles, and his captors look around.
“How are you, Lord Pavus?” Laurus calls. When he doesn't – cannot – answer, they laugh.
“Not very talkative, is he?”
“You should consider your loyalties,” Laurus continues, as Hugo sniggers into his wine. “This is what qunari do to their mages. Your beasts are no different, deep down.”
With his mouth sewn shut, they don't dose him with any more magebane, and over hours he feels its effects lift from him. Things become clearer, more acute, and rather more terrible to endure, but he will bear it for the sake of clarity. He'll never survive if he loses his head now, so he doesn't think about it. He's staying silent by choice, not because he can't speak. Not because he has wire threaded through his face, trapping his tongue behind his teeth. He's fine.
I shall weather the storm. I shall endure.
The torturer, Velius, is eager and distracted and small, barely filling out the Venatori uniform. Dorian could deal with him, especially still armoured as he is.
He has no doubt that Hugo has been punched before in his life, so he may well be able to withstand such things. It's a very punchable face, especially in that he keeps looking over and laughing at Dorian where he sits with his shoulder pressed uncomfortably against the bars of the cell.
Laurus is the main problem, and unfortunately seems to be the smartest of them. He could get lucky and take the others down, but the mage amongst them has already shown a talent for a full-body bind.
He has no intention of dying, even less of being shipped back to Tevinter with his mouth sewn shut.
They sleep in shifts, and Dorian doesn't sleep at all. Laurus writes letters – the draft of a ransom, it turns out, when the others gives their input. Velius butchers rabbits for pottage, and Hugo unsubtly paws himself through his trousers as he reads and re-reads a crumpled letter.
“Would you fuck a qunari?” he asks sometime later, as they share another bottle of wine.
Laurus huffs. “Try asking Pavus, he's so fond of beasts.”
“No, no. A girl qunari. If we'd got the Inquisitor—”
Dorian – who can't shout his protest, bangs his vambrace against the bars. They look over, and only Hugo doesn't turn away again.
“Oh, I'd have fucked her,” Velius crows. “Not any cow, but her, definitely. The great and powerful Inquisitor!”
Laurus has to shove the bottle on Hugo, who's still watching Dorian, frowning.
“If you want to fuck something, Hugo, then you can fuck Pavus.”
“Yeah?”
“Only I'm not holding him down for you, and you're not to do any damage.”
Hugo rises to his feet, hesitating. Considering.
“I'm going to give him some water.”
Dorian thinks of the Bull's war stories, where he talks around the terror he saw, scraps that have become terrible things in Dorian's mind. The inevitable violation of war, sex made a weapon – and this is a war. Better him than Adaar; she is too young, already bearing too much. What is one more reluctant fuck in his long life?
Hugo comes right up to the bars, and Dorian doesn't shrink away. He holds up a waterskin, and offers it up to Dorian's mouth. Perhaps he's decided against any violation; Dorian finds himself disappointed. There might not be as good an opportunity to get the upper hand than having one with his trousers around his ankles.
“Open up,” Hugo says, nearly giggles.
The water pours messily over Dorian's sewn mouth, down his jaw and into the collar of his robes, barely anything reaching through the minute gap between his aching lips, even as he tries to take the water in.
“Should have had some fun with you before we sewed your mouth up,” Hugo chuckles. “Heard the Pavus boy sucks cock better than any whore in the Qarinus dockyards. Bet my cock's bigger than the ox's too, you'd love it wo—”
Dorian reaches through the bars of the cell and grabs two handfuls of Hugo's shirt, and leverages all his strength to slam Hugo's face into the bars. His nose breaks with a clang and a crunch, and Dorian, on his feet now, slams him against the bars three more times before Laurus can grab his staff, find an angle and pin him to the back wall of the cell with magic.
“Well, that'll teach you,” Laurus says to Hugo, who is bleeding all over the flagstone and swearing wetly. He turns his gaze on Dorian as he releases his magical hold on him. Wisely, he's standing out of arm's reach of the cell bars. “Feeling better, are we? Without your magic you're just a caged animal. Appropriate, given today's discussion of your fondness for them.”
“I'll kill him!” Hugo yells. “Let me bend him over a barrel and fuck him until he tears his stitches!”
“Didn't your mother ever teach you not to stick your fingers through the bars at the animalarium?” Laurus almost sounds amused by the whole thing, but Dorian doesn't let his guard – for what it's worth – drop for a moment. “Go sit down and I'll fix your nose.”
Laurus pulls Dorian forward with magic, and then slams him back against the stone, rattling his skull and making him try to cry out in pain – pulling at the stitches over his mouth.
“Don't make yourself more trouble than you're worth.”
*
He manages to piss through the bars into the cell next door without drawing too much attention to himself. He doesn't sleep. His captors argue over their ransom plans, and Hugo glares at Dorian intermittently, nose healed but crooked and bruised.
The magebane leaves his system, and he can almost reach his magic. The collar is still dampening it, but now he knows it's there, instead of feeling an emptiness in the place where he's known it. He thinks of fire.
He can taste blood again, and he begins to wonder if the Inquisitor is coming for him. They must not be too hard to track through the Emprise, with all the snow to leave marks in. They haven't choked to death, so the dungeon they're in has ventilation, which must come out somewhere.
They wouldn't leave him to his fate. The Bull wouldn't.
In the long hours of the night, when hope has abandoned me—
His captors are growing restless when Dorian feels fire in his palm. He smothers it, presses his mutilated lips together firmly to hide his noise of triumph, and then his noise of pain.
Quietly, while they argue about how much they should demand of his father in ransom, Dorian presses his bound hands to the lock of his cell and sends ice into it. The same trick he used more than once to escape confinement in the Circles of his youth will hopefully serve him well now.
There's no plan, there never is. There are moves, tactics, but mostly it's not until the moment itself when Dorian knows gut-deep what to do. He is not going to die here. He is not going back to Tevinter.
The frozen lock shatters into pieces when Dorian sends a blast of magic through it. He can feel the weight of the collar, the way it tries to smother his magic as much a physical sensation as the metal against his neck, the padlock bumping his chest.
Velius is the quickest to react, jumping up and leaping into play with daggers drawn – Dorian slams him against the wall with the same trick they've been using on him, and releases him to slide down the wall, dazed long enough for Dorian to ready himself for an unfair fight.
Laurus next, trying the same – but Dorian is ready to press back against it, to shove the same force back against the oppression of his cast.
Hugo rushes at him with a sword, and he has to rely on the same trick to shove him back – Hugo is built strong, and he withstands the push, and readies another swing when Dorian has to strengthen his barrier against a crackle of lightning from Laurus.
He counters with fire, lines of it licking across the flagstone in the best approximation of a glyph he can make. Hands bound, and without a staff or words to channel it his magic is a wild thing, like a storm or a wave that he is trying to direct away from himself onto his opponents. They parry away from the flame, giving Dorian opportunity.
The room is a bottleneck, a long corridor with cells on either side, a more open area at the end that his captors have been using. His staff is there, amongst their loot, but Dorian steps the other way, down the corridor, keeping them at bay with force and fire. The ice he throws, not aimed at the encroaching fighters, he hopes they don't notice amongst the flame.
“Surrender, Pavus!” Laurus calls over the fire. “It will be easier if you give up now!”
He hits Hugo with lightning, and the soldier bears through it, and has to push Velius back with magic again to keep distance between them. Ten feet, fifteen, twenty.
“Surrender!” Laurus shouts again. “Or when we get you, I'll let Hugo fuck you however he wants! And then I'll let Velius do as he wants!”
“I'm going to take off your skin!” Velius jeers, as if Dorian had forgotten.
The room was once a kennel, Dorian is sure now – the bones are canine, and the spirits that linger here, the wisps, oh, they are hungry.
It hurts immeasurably, but he mumbles an incantation as best he can through his stitches lips, and calls to them.
And nothing that He has wrought shall be lost.
The rabid, hungry spirits follow his call to the corpses, binding willingly to bone and papery flesh. Left to starve here, leaving intact bones, but for the ones with broken teeth where they tries to bite through the cell bars. They're mabari, he realises, from the distinct shape of the skulls that look at him through the bars of almost all the cages. They are loyal.
The venatori shout their panic, Dorian releases his cast fire so they can see the dozens of hungry dead things waiting. One howls, an unearthly thing without a body to make the sound; the rattle of bone and the call of the Fade. In a moment, they're all howling. If he could, so would Dorian.
The cell doors give way easily, where the locks are fragile with Dorian's ice.
He urges them forward, and they pad out of their cells, the click of bone against the cold floor. They carry the power of his conjured horror with them, as they build pace and descend on the Venatori. Hugo shatters one in a spray of flying bones before they overrun him, tearing through his armour and into his flesh.
Velius finds his dagger almost useless, no living tissue to pierce, no eyes to blind, and they take him to the floor next and bite at his throat and face.
Laurus, fires lightning amongst the pack, and Dorian tries to wrap each of Laurus' targets in a barrier to deflect the worst of it. He needn't worry – in the narrow corridor, the pack descending from in front and behind, it isn't long before Dorian is watching them tear the other mage apart.
The screaming lasts less than a minute, each voice fading to the sound of clacking bone. The dogs have no muscle and no stomachs, so all they can do is chew at the mangled flesh and bone while Dorian retrieves his staff.
Blood runs between the flagstone, and he makes no attempt to avoid it as he steps back through their torn-apart corpses.
He doesn't release the hounds, unwilling to commit their bones to this dungeon forever. They follow at his heel as he picks his way through the abandoned fortress. He doesn’t recognise the heraldry, but he knows it can't be Fereldan – no Fereldan kennel master would leave his dogs to die.
The sun hurts his eyes against the snow when he emerges from the ruin. It's so much colder outside, and he can feel acutely his magic draining away to sustain the pack of dogs. Whatever they once were – man, beast, or never either at all – they run into the sunlight, bounding through the snow like any mortal dog. Their bones clatter, and their yelping, barking noises set Dorian's teeth on edge. The bitter wind whistles through their ribcages. Some of them still have collars around their necks, tags jingling from them. He'll absolutely have to horrify Cullen with this image when he returns to Skyhold.
He stumbles into the snow, losing his grip on his staff. A skeletal hound with a missing back leg snuffles around him, and then sits, expectant.
Good dog, he thinks to say. Can't, of course, but feels the sting of the attempt at his mutilated mouth. He reaches out with his bound hands and strokes the dog's skull, the bone cold and hollow.
He lets the dogs go.
He take ups his staff again and tries to stand, but his knees shake from under him, and he lands heavily in the snow. The power he has is halved under the collar, he can barely bring warmth to his fingers after what he's expended to free himself.
The blood from his mouth is bright red in the snow. He might die here.