Under a Broken Sky
@empresstress13 commissioned me to continue the AU where Ellana and Beatrix Tabris are cousins, and I was all too delighted to! I had such fun reimagining the opening of the game with Bea included :)
Thank you, my friend, for commissioning me!
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Pairing: Beatrix Tabris x Leliana
Rating: General
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The snow of the Frostbacks crunched under Beatrix Tabris’s boots as she approached Haven, her stomach in thick knots of anxiety. She’d been on her way to the Temple of Sacred Ashes when the explosion happened. It lit up the whole sky, and lit up every drop of blood in her body with fear.
Leliana. Ellana. Everyone who went there in good faith -
She’d hurried to Haven after that, her heart in her throat the whole way. Leliana’s name was the one singing through her mind over and over and over again. It had been so long since they had seen each other. Leliana was busy acting as Left Hand of the Divine and Bea was busy acting as Spymaster of Amaranthine. It couldn’t be over like this, it could not be over like this, she would get to Haven and Leliana would be okay, and Bea would hold her again.
And then, every so often, her thoughts would drift to Ellana Lavellan, her newly discovered cousin, who’d been sent by her clan to the Conclave as a spy. They’d only just found each other. She couldn’t be ripped away now.
Bea had not been with Nehnara Surana to the Temple of Sacred Ashes when her dearest friend was trying to save Arl Eamon. They had not reunited by that point. But Bea knew what it was supposed to be like from Nehn’s descriptions - massive, ancient, made entirely of stone and yet somehow alive, so grand it seemed impossible that the mountains had not simply birthed it on their own.
It was only a crater now.
She could see that now, just as she could see the mountain passes swarming with demons and soldiers. Just as she could see the angry green gash in the sky, sparking and twisting over and over again. Haven was not a Haven at all. It was a madhouse.
“You,” she barked at the nearest soldier as she drew close to the chaos, her hands already drifting to the hilts of her knives. “Who’s in charge?”
“Seeker Pentaghast,” he said. “She’s with the prisoner now. The one who caused all of this.”
Cassandra Pentaghast. The Right Hand of the Divine. If she survived then maybe - maybe - Leliana had too.
“Take me to them,” Bea said in her most commanding tone. “Now.”
It was hard to believe that the scrappy girl who had grown up in Denerim’s alienage had a commanding tone now, but she did. She was a Spymaster after all. But when she stepped into the old Chantry and followed the trembling soldier down into the dank prison beneath it, she started to feel like the frightened, powerless, scrappy little girl she had once been. If Leliana was not there - if Cassandra told her the worst -
But a wooden door creaked open, and Leliana was there, beautiful as sunrise, whole and healthy in her lilac and silverite armor, the hood draped over her head. Her arms were crossed and her back was to Bea but Bea would have known her anywhere, and she could have wept for joy to see her. Leliana. She was safe.
Cassandra Pentaghast was in the room too, and so was someone else, kneeling on the floor, bound in chains - the prisoner who had caused all this destruction.
“Ellana?”
The word escaped Bea’s lips before she could stop herself. All three women in the room turned to her - Cassandra, Leliana, and, yes, Ellana Lavellan, her long lost cousin, swaying on her knees and looking disoriented and angry, her hands bound in chains, green light coming from the space between them.
“Bea,” Leliana breathed, turning. She started towards Bea but paused. Of course. They were conducting an interrogation. Leliana could not seem soft now.
“Let her go,” Bea said at once. “She had nothing to do with this.”
“Do you have any proof of that?” Cassandra asked, her voice tight with rage. “Because before you stands the only survivor of that Maker forsaken temple. The last woman to see Divine Justinia alive.”
The Divine was dead?
It made sense. Bea had seen the devastation. But still her mind was reeling. The Divine was dead. How would this affect the war between mages and templars? Her sources in various chantries around Thedas? The political situation for the Wardens?
And Ellana was the only one alive? How?
“I told you,” Ellana said, and her tone was hard, too. The kind of anger that came from fear. “I don’t know what happened to the Divine. I don’t know what happened at all. I -”
Before she could finish her sentence, awful crackles of green light sprouted from her left palm, enveloping the cell in their eerie glow. Ellana bent double, crying out in pain, cradling her left hand, and that was when Bea saw it - the gash of light in her left palm, a mirror image of the cracked sky outside.
“It’s getting worse,” Cassandra said, tersely. “We need to move, now. We need to get her to the Breach.”
The fit subsided. Ellana looked up, angry and confused once more.
“What? Where are you taking me?”
“I’ll be right there, cousin,” Bea said at once. “We’ll go together.”
Ellana looked at Bea, a long and searching gaze, her grey eyes flinty. Then she nodded, and hauled herself off of the floor of the cell.
Leliana caught Bea’s arm as they walked out of the cell, pulling her aside.
“My love,” she murmured, catching Bea in a quick embrace. “I have missed you.”
Bea pushed aside all thoughts of the broken sky and the turmoil outside and the strange energy radiating from Ellana’s hand (she needed to write to Nehnara at once, Nehn would know what it was, Nehn would know what to do) and focused only on the way Leliana smelled. Like lavender and clean cotton and Andraste’s grace.
“She didn’t do it, Leli,” Bea said at once, tightening her hold on Leliana. Maker, it felt so good to have her in her arms again. “Ellana. Whatever happened here, it wasn’t her. I know it.”
Leliana drew back and cupped Bea’s face. “You always see the good in people, Bea. And I know that she is your kin, but the evidence is damning. We need to see where it leads.”
Leliana was right of course. But Bea knew Ellana was innocent. She knew it in her bones. And Ellana was family, and Bea would protect her however she had to.
“I’m coming with you. I need to see where it leads, too.”
“I would have you nowhere else. I have - it has been so hard, Bea. These last few days. Justinia -”
Leliana’s voice broke. She looked away. Bea turned her lover’s face back to her and kissed her sweetly on the mouth and for a moment there was nothing but that kiss, perfect as spring’s first rain.
“Let’s go. We’re going to figure this out. We are.”
And Bea knew that in her bones, too. She was a master of spies and a scrappy alienage woman and she protected the people she loved no matter what it took. Together, they walked back out to the fresh snow and the broken sky and towards what was left of the Temple of Sacred Ashes.
