It was snowing again. Skyhold had become a beautiful, still, serene place, ill fit for an execution.
That there was need for one, Romulus was certain. At least, as certain as he could be about anything these days. Estella didn't seem to think so, from what he could tell, but most of the others seemed to be in agreement: Anais was too dangerous to be allowed to operate in any capacity, within or beyond the walls of Skyhold. He supposed there were other people that could carry out the sentence better than he, but Romulus felt that he had no right to condemn her if he was not willing to make an end of it himself.
The sword that Reed handed him was heavier and longer than he was used to, no doubt compounded by the fact that his arm was very much still healing, as was the rest of his body. He'd downed a strong potion just before emerging to dull the pain, and let him move well enough to swing the blade. It dulled his senses enough that he didn't really notice the small crowd of people gathering to witness as he ascended the newly constructed platform. The Inquisition hadn't made a habit of executing people, and so such a location hadn't been required until now. Romulus didn't doubt it would be taken down soon enough, so they didn't develop a reputation for it.
A pair of Inquisition soldiers watched over the Speaker, who knelt with her hands bound behind her, feet tied as well, a solid stone block placed in front of her. She contemplated it calmly, having had a full night to prepare for her death, save for the brief time it took for her to give up the names of a few of her cultists, those that were complicit in her plan. Romulus knew not what would be done with them. Labor probably, to lighten the load on the army.
Romulus paused for a moment atop the platform, briefly surveying those that had chosen to witness the execution. Leon stood among the crowd, most likely in attendance as a matter of formality. He took no official place on the platform, perhaps feeling that the few necessary functions for such an event had already been taken care of by others. Khari stood next to Leon, much less noticeable in the tall man's shadow. Beside Reed, Rilien remained unmoving on the platform, to all appearances still as stone.
On the other side of them, Marceline stood with a scroll in hand. She took one last glance at Romulus before she pulled open the parchment and began to read the sentence. "Speaker Anais, for the crimes of fraud, heresy, collusion, and attempted sedition, which put not only the Inquisition, but her Inquisitors and their people in peril as well, you have been sentenced to death. May the Maker have mercy on your soul." With the grim sentence read aloud, Marceline took a step back and turned to witness the execution.
Romulus approached Anais, the two soldiers placing their hands upon her shoulders. He studied her and she him for a moment, and Romulus could not deny he was disappointed not to see any fear. Some darker part of his past was calling to him, making him keenly aware of all the ways he could drag this out and make her suffer. But this would have to do, this clean death. "Do you have any last words?"
"None capable of staying your blade," she said honestly, though her eyes wandered away from Romulus and over the crowd. "I placed a murderer within your walls. You've now placed a murderer on your throne." She leaned forward without any assistance from the guards, exposing the back of her neck to Romulus. He found himself wishing he hadn't asked her to speak. It was what she'd done throughout her entire life.
He raised the sword in both hands and brought it down with focus. The Speaker's head fell away from her body.
Romulus walked away seething, handing the bloody sword back to Reed and not wanting to look at the mess any longer. Silence fell over the courtyard save for a few quiet murmurs, and the crowd began to disperse. He stopped, a few steps from the stairs to the Keep, realizing that his marked hand was shaking. He grabbed it with his other, ignoring the dull pain in that arm, and forced it to stop.
“You don't look like you feel any better." The words came from just behind him; the voice was easily-recognizable as Khari's. She stopped next to him, her eyes falling to his hand for a moment before they lifted back up towards his face. Her expression was unusually grim, her words factual and without the inflection good humor so often gave them. Then again, most everything had been like that lately.
She heaved a sigh. “Want to take a walk? No one will bother us if we go up the battlements."
He exhaled shakily, and nodded. He didn't feel any better, that was certain. If anything he felt worse. He told himself that the point of ending Anais was not, in fact, to make himself feel better, but rather to end the threat she posed to the Inquisition, and to bring about some kind of justice for what she'd done. He wanted so much to feel better after removing her head. He wondered if he would had he cut off Conrado's as well. Probably not, but he would never get the chance to find out now. He'd had the chance to bring everyone that had brought about his parents' death to justice, and he'd let it go. If it was for the best, it sure didn't feel like it.
They headed down the slope from the courtyard before the Keep to the stairs leading up to the outer walls, silent all the way. He wasn't used to any kind of silence lingering for long when he was with Khari, but then again he wasn't used to any of this. The view from atop the walls was breathtaking as ever, with the army camp below constantly smoking and glowing from the lit flames, and the cold peaks of the snow-covered mountains stretching endlessly in the distance.
"I'm not used to things being personal," he admitted, finally, grimacing from the cold, his injuries, and the uncomfortable acknowledgement. "I didn't handle this well. Any of it. I'm..." His hand curled into a tight fist. "I feel so bloodthirsty. I wanted to hurt her. Make her suffer. I wanted to kill Conrado too, and would have if the others hadn't talked me out of it."
“I've never felt like that." There wasn't any judgement in Khari's tone; if anything, her expression suggested that she was trying her best to understand. This kind of thing didn't often seem to come easily to her—perhaps it was because they were so different from each other, in terms of where they'd come from and how they'd ended up here, with the Inquisition. “But then... I've always known who my parents are, and they're still alive. I think." She shrugged. “And I've definitely never had anyone try to tell me I was the world-changing kind of important and fuck with my head like that."
For a second, her mouth dropped into a scowl, but it eased a few seconds later. “So maybe I've got no room to talk, but I think nobody would have handled it fantastically. You handled it well enough that we're still here. I'm not dead, the Riptide's not sunk, Anais isn't still deluding everyone here and Borja's never gonna murder anyone else's parents. That's all on you as much as the rest of it is." She crossed her arms, shrugging her mottled brown cloak a little further forward against the chill.
"None of it would have happened at all if I wasn't such a fool." He heard what she was saying. Every step of the way he had tried to do what he thought was right, for him, for the Inquisition, for the future, but every step of the way he fell right into their trap, right up until it was almost shut for good, too late to escape. And Borja... just thinking about the time they spent together made him feel ill. Thinking about the way he felt when the man first revealed himself and his supposed relation in the Hinterlands. "I thought he was my father. I was really willing to believe it. It wasn't so hard, in the end. I turned out to be just as much a killer as he was."
It had been so selfish. All of it. He'd allowed himself to have a tiny bit of pride in himself just for a moment, and Anais and Borja together caused it to swell until they could tell him anything, show him anything, and he would believe it. Even if what they told him was ludicrously improbable, to the point of impossibility. "If you had died..." He let the thought trail off, fighting the tightness in his throat. "I don't think I could do this. As is, I don't know if I should. I've never been anything more than someone's tool. Even when I've thought I was in control."
He leaned forward against the wall for support, suddenly feeling the pain in his body more keenly as the potion wore off. "I don't know what I am. Who I am."
“You know I actually went to him and encouraged him to talk to you?" Khari snorted softly, shaking her head vigorously enough that her hood fell to her shoulders. She didn't make any effort to put it back, though. “I thought... I thought he was just being awkward because he didn't know how to approach you. I actually tried to make it easier for him." Taking a couple more steps, she uncrossed her arms and used them to brace herself on the wall next to him, fixing her eyes out on the landscape. “Shoulda been harder for him to fool me. He wasn't giving me any answers I'd been looking for, and I still fell for it."
Her brows furrowed, forming a little line above her nose. “It's awful. You'll never get me to believe otherwise. But... here's what I think: if what's in the past is shitty, focusing on it won't ever make anything better. Maybe you haven't ever been anything else, but that doesn't mean you never will be. The future's wide open, if you're willing to kick the door down. You can decide who you are." She shrugged. “And you know... from where I'm standing, the present's not so bad either. It was a painful hurdle, but you cleared it. And you're here, Lord Inquisitor and everything, and we're gonna save the whole damn world. You're gonna save it. I'd like to see anyone try and call you their puppet then."
Kick the door down. That was her way, wasn't it? Chryseis would've told him to use the window, and then open the door for her from the inside. And Romulus... he didn't know what he'd do, because even still he didn't feel he was making his own decisions. Being a Herald was never his choice, fighting Corypheus wasn't his choice, and his appearance had even made staying with the Inquisition not his choice, not really. He suppose he chose to be Inquisitor, but what was the first thing he did with his power, his freedom to choose? He chose to lop off a woman's head for vengeance, and to try to do the same to a cowardly man who didn't have much more choice than he did.
"I'm going to keep making these mistakes," he said. A moment passed, until he actually laughed darkly. "This must be how Estella felt when they pushed the title on her." But unlike her, he was worried he wouldn't make the mistakes with the best of intentions. She was taught differently than him, she thought differently than him. Romulus was taught to kill, to destroy the enemies of his mistress, and he eagerly did so because he knew it would please her. He was taught to please. Khari didn't know half of the horrible things he'd done, and he didn't know if he would ever have the heart to tell her. Maybe he never would, and maybe that was for the best.
If she was right, it didn't matter. All those years of conditioning didn't matter, if he could just focus on being something else going forward. "You're a good friend, you know that?" He smiled to himself. "Who am I kidding, of course you know. What I mean to say is..." He struggled to find the right words. "You know what I mean. You're... brilliant. One of a kind. Better than I deserve."
Khari laughed at that—not uproariously, just a quiet ha, more expelled air than sound. Gently, probably mindful of his injuries, she knocked her elbow into his arm. “Well, that's the thing, right? It's not like you've suddenly got to figure everything out by yourself. I'm here for you, if you need me. The others, too. You've got friends. And we'll definitely tell you if we think you're doing something dumb."
She flashed a grin, one of her more ragged ones. “And hey, you're a pretty great friend too. Really. You know you're the first person who ever didn't laugh at me when I told you what I was trying to do with my life? Even my teacher thought I was crazy to start with." She paused. “Well, I am, I guess. But you believed me. That means a lot. So don't be too down on yourself. And—ask me to remind you, sometimes, about the good things. I'd be happy to." It was an inverse of the request another version of Khari had once made of him, in a future that would never be.
He wasn't very good at asking. Never had been, likely as part of his conditioning. Figuring things out on his own was also not one of his skills, when he had always been told what to think and feel, and more importantly what to do. He scratched at his beard, still smiling despite the weight still on his shoulders. He really ought to get rid of the beard, once it was a bit warmer. He was done with every thought of being some religious figure, Herald of Andraste or no, and somehow it seemed to be included in that.
"I think you're the perfect kind of crazy, to help someone like me." He really did believe that. He also believed she was quite beautiful, when she grinned like that, when she laughed at the things he said.
Maybe someday he'd find a way to tell her that, too.
That there was need for one, Romulus was certain. At least, as certain as he could be about anything these days. Estella didn't seem to think so, from what he could tell, but most of the others seemed to be in agreement: Anais was too dangerous to be allowed to operate in any capacity, within or beyond the walls of Skyhold. He supposed there were other people that could carry out the sentence better than he, but Romulus felt that he had no right to condemn her if he was not willing to make an end of it himself.
The sword that Reed handed him was heavier and longer than he was used to, no doubt compounded by the fact that his arm was very much still healing, as was the rest of his body. He'd downed a strong potion just before emerging to dull the pain, and let him move well enough to swing the blade. It dulled his senses enough that he didn't really notice the small crowd of people gathering to witness as he ascended the newly constructed platform. The Inquisition hadn't made a habit of executing people, and so such a location hadn't been required until now. Romulus didn't doubt it would be taken down soon enough, so they didn't develop a reputation for it.
A pair of Inquisition soldiers watched over the Speaker, who knelt with her hands bound behind her, feet tied as well, a solid stone block placed in front of her. She contemplated it calmly, having had a full night to prepare for her death, save for the brief time it took for her to give up the names of a few of her cultists, those that were complicit in her plan. Romulus knew not what would be done with them. Labor probably, to lighten the load on the army.
Romulus paused for a moment atop the platform, briefly surveying those that had chosen to witness the execution. Leon stood among the crowd, most likely in attendance as a matter of formality. He took no official place on the platform, perhaps feeling that the few necessary functions for such an event had already been taken care of by others. Khari stood next to Leon, much less noticeable in the tall man's shadow. Beside Reed, Rilien remained unmoving on the platform, to all appearances still as stone.
On the other side of them, Marceline stood with a scroll in hand. She took one last glance at Romulus before she pulled open the parchment and began to read the sentence. "Speaker Anais, for the crimes of fraud, heresy, collusion, and attempted sedition, which put not only the Inquisition, but her Inquisitors and their people in peril as well, you have been sentenced to death. May the Maker have mercy on your soul." With the grim sentence read aloud, Marceline took a step back and turned to witness the execution.
Romulus approached Anais, the two soldiers placing their hands upon her shoulders. He studied her and she him for a moment, and Romulus could not deny he was disappointed not to see any fear. Some darker part of his past was calling to him, making him keenly aware of all the ways he could drag this out and make her suffer. But this would have to do, this clean death. "Do you have any last words?"
"None capable of staying your blade," she said honestly, though her eyes wandered away from Romulus and over the crowd. "I placed a murderer within your walls. You've now placed a murderer on your throne." She leaned forward without any assistance from the guards, exposing the back of her neck to Romulus. He found himself wishing he hadn't asked her to speak. It was what she'd done throughout her entire life.
He raised the sword in both hands and brought it down with focus. The Speaker's head fell away from her body.
Romulus walked away seething, handing the bloody sword back to Reed and not wanting to look at the mess any longer. Silence fell over the courtyard save for a few quiet murmurs, and the crowd began to disperse. He stopped, a few steps from the stairs to the Keep, realizing that his marked hand was shaking. He grabbed it with his other, ignoring the dull pain in that arm, and forced it to stop.
“You don't look like you feel any better." The words came from just behind him; the voice was easily-recognizable as Khari's. She stopped next to him, her eyes falling to his hand for a moment before they lifted back up towards his face. Her expression was unusually grim, her words factual and without the inflection good humor so often gave them. Then again, most everything had been like that lately.
She heaved a sigh. “Want to take a walk? No one will bother us if we go up the battlements."
He exhaled shakily, and nodded. He didn't feel any better, that was certain. If anything he felt worse. He told himself that the point of ending Anais was not, in fact, to make himself feel better, but rather to end the threat she posed to the Inquisition, and to bring about some kind of justice for what she'd done. He wanted so much to feel better after removing her head. He wondered if he would had he cut off Conrado's as well. Probably not, but he would never get the chance to find out now. He'd had the chance to bring everyone that had brought about his parents' death to justice, and he'd let it go. If it was for the best, it sure didn't feel like it.
They headed down the slope from the courtyard before the Keep to the stairs leading up to the outer walls, silent all the way. He wasn't used to any kind of silence lingering for long when he was with Khari, but then again he wasn't used to any of this. The view from atop the walls was breathtaking as ever, with the army camp below constantly smoking and glowing from the lit flames, and the cold peaks of the snow-covered mountains stretching endlessly in the distance.
"I'm not used to things being personal," he admitted, finally, grimacing from the cold, his injuries, and the uncomfortable acknowledgement. "I didn't handle this well. Any of it. I'm..." His hand curled into a tight fist. "I feel so bloodthirsty. I wanted to hurt her. Make her suffer. I wanted to kill Conrado too, and would have if the others hadn't talked me out of it."
“I've never felt like that." There wasn't any judgement in Khari's tone; if anything, her expression suggested that she was trying her best to understand. This kind of thing didn't often seem to come easily to her—perhaps it was because they were so different from each other, in terms of where they'd come from and how they'd ended up here, with the Inquisition. “But then... I've always known who my parents are, and they're still alive. I think." She shrugged. “And I've definitely never had anyone try to tell me I was the world-changing kind of important and fuck with my head like that."
For a second, her mouth dropped into a scowl, but it eased a few seconds later. “So maybe I've got no room to talk, but I think nobody would have handled it fantastically. You handled it well enough that we're still here. I'm not dead, the Riptide's not sunk, Anais isn't still deluding everyone here and Borja's never gonna murder anyone else's parents. That's all on you as much as the rest of it is." She crossed her arms, shrugging her mottled brown cloak a little further forward against the chill.
"None of it would have happened at all if I wasn't such a fool." He heard what she was saying. Every step of the way he had tried to do what he thought was right, for him, for the Inquisition, for the future, but every step of the way he fell right into their trap, right up until it was almost shut for good, too late to escape. And Borja... just thinking about the time they spent together made him feel ill. Thinking about the way he felt when the man first revealed himself and his supposed relation in the Hinterlands. "I thought he was my father. I was really willing to believe it. It wasn't so hard, in the end. I turned out to be just as much a killer as he was."
It had been so selfish. All of it. He'd allowed himself to have a tiny bit of pride in himself just for a moment, and Anais and Borja together caused it to swell until they could tell him anything, show him anything, and he would believe it. Even if what they told him was ludicrously improbable, to the point of impossibility. "If you had died..." He let the thought trail off, fighting the tightness in his throat. "I don't think I could do this. As is, I don't know if I should. I've never been anything more than someone's tool. Even when I've thought I was in control."
He leaned forward against the wall for support, suddenly feeling the pain in his body more keenly as the potion wore off. "I don't know what I am. Who I am."
“You know I actually went to him and encouraged him to talk to you?" Khari snorted softly, shaking her head vigorously enough that her hood fell to her shoulders. She didn't make any effort to put it back, though. “I thought... I thought he was just being awkward because he didn't know how to approach you. I actually tried to make it easier for him." Taking a couple more steps, she uncrossed her arms and used them to brace herself on the wall next to him, fixing her eyes out on the landscape. “Shoulda been harder for him to fool me. He wasn't giving me any answers I'd been looking for, and I still fell for it."
Her brows furrowed, forming a little line above her nose. “It's awful. You'll never get me to believe otherwise. But... here's what I think: if what's in the past is shitty, focusing on it won't ever make anything better. Maybe you haven't ever been anything else, but that doesn't mean you never will be. The future's wide open, if you're willing to kick the door down. You can decide who you are." She shrugged. “And you know... from where I'm standing, the present's not so bad either. It was a painful hurdle, but you cleared it. And you're here, Lord Inquisitor and everything, and we're gonna save the whole damn world. You're gonna save it. I'd like to see anyone try and call you their puppet then."
Kick the door down. That was her way, wasn't it? Chryseis would've told him to use the window, and then open the door for her from the inside. And Romulus... he didn't know what he'd do, because even still he didn't feel he was making his own decisions. Being a Herald was never his choice, fighting Corypheus wasn't his choice, and his appearance had even made staying with the Inquisition not his choice, not really. He suppose he chose to be Inquisitor, but what was the first thing he did with his power, his freedom to choose? He chose to lop off a woman's head for vengeance, and to try to do the same to a cowardly man who didn't have much more choice than he did.
"I'm going to keep making these mistakes," he said. A moment passed, until he actually laughed darkly. "This must be how Estella felt when they pushed the title on her." But unlike her, he was worried he wouldn't make the mistakes with the best of intentions. She was taught differently than him, she thought differently than him. Romulus was taught to kill, to destroy the enemies of his mistress, and he eagerly did so because he knew it would please her. He was taught to please. Khari didn't know half of the horrible things he'd done, and he didn't know if he would ever have the heart to tell her. Maybe he never would, and maybe that was for the best.
If she was right, it didn't matter. All those years of conditioning didn't matter, if he could just focus on being something else going forward. "You're a good friend, you know that?" He smiled to himself. "Who am I kidding, of course you know. What I mean to say is..." He struggled to find the right words. "You know what I mean. You're... brilliant. One of a kind. Better than I deserve."
Khari laughed at that—not uproariously, just a quiet ha, more expelled air than sound. Gently, probably mindful of his injuries, she knocked her elbow into his arm. “Well, that's the thing, right? It's not like you've suddenly got to figure everything out by yourself. I'm here for you, if you need me. The others, too. You've got friends. And we'll definitely tell you if we think you're doing something dumb."
She flashed a grin, one of her more ragged ones. “And hey, you're a pretty great friend too. Really. You know you're the first person who ever didn't laugh at me when I told you what I was trying to do with my life? Even my teacher thought I was crazy to start with." She paused. “Well, I am, I guess. But you believed me. That means a lot. So don't be too down on yourself. And—ask me to remind you, sometimes, about the good things. I'd be happy to." It was an inverse of the request another version of Khari had once made of him, in a future that would never be.
He wasn't very good at asking. Never had been, likely as part of his conditioning. Figuring things out on his own was also not one of his skills, when he had always been told what to think and feel, and more importantly what to do. He scratched at his beard, still smiling despite the weight still on his shoulders. He really ought to get rid of the beard, once it was a bit warmer. He was done with every thought of being some religious figure, Herald of Andraste or no, and somehow it seemed to be included in that.
"I think you're the perfect kind of crazy, to help someone like me." He really did believe that. He also believed she was quite beautiful, when she grinned like that, when she laughed at the things he said.
Maybe someday he'd find a way to tell her that, too.