Dresden Age Inquisition by Thepkrmgc

Disclamer: I don't own any of the rights, I'm not making any money off this, please don't sue me.

Kudo's to theassassinlover and itachi-Uchiha-lover for betaing!

Dresden Age Inquisition, Chapter three: War Never Changes

I'm no stranger to conflict: my scars speak for themselves even if I can't remember their stories. Years of battles have sewn a tapestry onto my very bones and despite everything I've forgotten those instincts remain. Even so, as we descended from the frostbacks we entered a world in conflict with itself. It wasn't as simple as good vs evil, it wasn't just "mages vs templars" or even "demons vs everyone". Opportunists the world over, mercenaries of every stripe and Tevinter slavers, gathered in hopes of easy prey, only to get embroiled in this war of all versus all where the only winners were the crows.

None of the groups were even remotely united, even the demons fought amongst themselves, and not even Leliana's informants could keep track of all the factional disputes going on. I think that of all things is what let us get our first tentative footholds there. If any of the regional powers had made a concerted push against us there wasn't much we could have done, for all our spirit, after the attrition at the breach we simply didn't have enough blades at hand.

But they deemed us beneath their notice, there were more profitable targets at hand or half a dozen other things. In these few weeks, the fate of the world hung not in the hands of heroes but the whims of a dozen petty despots: and they chose to stay their hand.

Despite all our team spirit, we still lost people. Thedas is dangerous enough without demons and deserters running rampant over the countryside. Cullen kept the full logs, but I made a point of remembering their names, and tried to add a personal touch to all the letters of condolences that inevitably waited upon my return to Haven. I'm not going to demean their sacrifice, or rationalize away the guilt in the name of some greater good.

Directly or indirectly, they died because we ordered them into the field. They died because they chose to fight the coming darkness instead of sitting back as it consumed the world. And whatever reasons they fought for, they died because I wasn't fast enough, wasn't strong enough, or just wasn't there. They died because they put their faith in me, and I couldn't hold up my end of the bargain: some hero that makes me…

Still, I'm no armchair commander: I wouldn't have asked them to put their lives on the line if I wasn't slogging through the mud right there beside them. I couldn't be everywhere at once, but more often than not I was the one leading the charge when the time came to push into hostile territory. At least, I would have been, if not for Cassandra, who had voluntold the rest of us that she would be directing the forward operations in the region. Somehow, that translated into following my sorry ass halfway across the hinterlands trying to stop the rest of us from running into trouble: introducing said trouble's face to her shield when it inevitably appeared.

And, unlike almost every other resource of note, trouble was the one thing we had absolutely no shortage of. From bandits, to apocalypse cults, seriously: why are there always cults! Even the bears must have eaten some bad honey or something because they seemed to have mistaken us for a bunch of wandering picnic baskets. The way things were going, I'm surprised the nugs didn't try to rip our throats out.

As ominous as the dire fennecs were, the red lyrium was far more troubling: scattered deposits punching through the bowels of the earth while the world cried in pain. You could feel it's greasy taint from miles away, marking the earth below even as rifts tore up the sky. The rifts felt alien, like some invaders from outside the mortal plane to be sent back from whence they came. The red kryptonite was an entirely mortal evil, somehow it belonged here: as warped as it was. I couldn't have come close, not that I'd wanted to: if it weren't for my staff it'd have brought me to my knees from half a dozen yards away. Thankfully, I didn't have to: pervasive as it was, it's taint still fled before a cleansing flame. Cassandra, oddly unaffected by the grim miasma, was quick to set the rocks ablaze: I pretended that I didn't hear the screams.

The mage's had struck a decisive blow with the fall of the circles, but their mass exodus from their circles had been anything but cohesive, and any discipline they had initially possessed was checked at the door. They had been unified by their shared oppression. But, having broken their chains, many found themselves unsure about what to do with their new-found freedom. For all their arcane power: the vast majority of them were scholars not soldiers, and they were ill equipped for a life outside their gilded cage.

Liberty might be ambrosia of the soul, but it makes a poor substitute for bread. They weren't without allies, but there was a world of difference between saying that "You know what, maybe we shouldn't lock toddlers in a tower for the rest of their lives just because they happen to have been born with magic." and actively sheltering said mages with the templars hot on their tail. Many apostates came out in support of their emancipated brethren, but mistrust ran deep: each side blaming the other for inciting the templars to war.

And to top it off, they lacked leadership. Their college of enchanters might deserve props for being the closest thing to democracy you can get on Thedas. But the road to revolution was wracked by infighting and partisan debate, and the Grand Enchanter, supremely intelligent woman she may be, was a battlemage, not a diplomat. The Champion might have been able to unify them, but she was nowhere to be found. Though the Kirkwall delegation nearly elected her in absentia. To hear Varric tell it, she'd had enough of revolution to last a lifetime, going off to parts unknown after the battle: soaked in blood and tears.

As the enchanters departed to their respective circles to relay the call to arms those fissures remained, compounded by all the petty disputes within each circle's hierarchy. What could have been a revolutionary army soon devolved into a hundred petty mobs roaming across the better part of four nations. Thousands would have starved, or else resorted to more desperate measures if the king of Ferelden hadn't offered them sanctuary. Ostensibly in return for the mage's assistance against the darkspawn ten years ago. Though the more cynical rumor's commented on the king's dalliances during the blight, and the Grand Enchanter's striking resemblance to the late Heroine of Ferelden.

But it was a long road to Redcliff and, out of bloodlust or paranoia or simply ignorance it was one that many chose not to take. Some joined the Inquisition, happy to help save the world if it brought them their daily bread. The rest still needed to eat, and all too that food came out of the mouths of those with little enough to spare as is. Armies march upon their stomachs, and of all the forces fighting in the region: the Inquisition was the only one that brought it's own food. What the marauding armies didn't take, they burned: as famine became yet another weapon of war. In absence of bread, hungry refugees turned to the woods to fill their empty bellies, but that only served to bring the wolves down upon them as the beasts began to starve in turn.

But the templars? The templars were another matter entirely. Before the war, the Order had all the things the mage's lacked, they were disciplined, organized, with a rigid chain of command that was well established before the war, and abilities uniquely suited to battle demonic threats. Their reputation, while tarnished by their inaction during the blight and carnage at Dairsmuid and Kirkwall: still ran deep. Centuries of chantry propaganda had left its mark, the winds of change had been blowing in recent years, but public opinion does not shift quickly or unanimously. As often as not they were welcomed as heroes: knights in shining armor coming to save the day.

But, like the mages, when the Templars split from the Chantry they cut themselves off from their logistical foundation. Before the war, they had been first and foremost a garrison force, tied to the circles nearly as much as the mages they were tasked to defend. While Lambert had pulled a great deal of troops to the capital before his untimely demise, when the Circle's blew their tops casualty rates had been shockingly high: leaving tens of thousands of knights dead at their at their posts and the bulk of the survivors scattered and hungry for vengeance. Following the late Lord Seeker's break from the Chantry, they shortly found themselves hungry for food as well.

Desertion ran rampant. The dwarven king, a Machiavellian bastard by all accounts, offered to double the Chantry's lyrium ration for anyone willing to fight the darkspawn. It wasn't long before the warden's followed suit, well aware of the ever-present threat of darkspawn emissaries. A splinter faction, lead by Knight Commander Bryant, redefined their mission to one of mercy: and dedicated themselves to protecting those of their flock the war had led astray. What moderates they had were at the conclave, trying to forge a semblance of peace from their prophet's ash. By the time I stumbled out in the middle of things they had either joined up with Sparkles or else met their god firsthand.

To make up for their losses, they turned to mass conscription: pulling men and women off their farms at sword point. Arming them with dead men's clothes and sending them off to fight forces from beyond the fade with little more than a pitchfork and a prayer. They were the lucky ones: they weren't issued lyrium, the limited supplies of the magic mineral being hoarded by the high command for personal use. We managed to talk some of those poor sods down after Bianca rendered their commanding officer shorter by a head. More often than not the home they'd left was gone, torn apart by the tides of war. A few joined the Inquisition, but most just merged with the unending flow of refugees displaced by the conflict or else turned to banditry: doing to others what had been done to them.

But behind the peasant levies was a core of fanatics. Veterans of countless battles against the worst the fade could throw at them, more dangerous than any hungry wolf. These were the men who'd watched the likes of Uldred and Orsino turn to monsters wearing human skin for the sake of madness and petty greed. Who'd seen a blood mage poison an Arl and teach a boy in his first decade to make the dead rise from their graves: only for both to get away with barely a slap on the wrist due to the actions of an elven mage with tainted blood. These were the men who saw a Blood Mage become a Champion, and kill her brother before a cheering crowd. These were men who'd had enough, and I'd seen their type before, heroin addicts at the end of their rope, with bodies ravaged by the war and withdrawal alike. eyes gleaming as if lit by the madness within. Any pretenses of nobility and honor they might have had in times of peace were long gone, or at least they'd stopped pretending. This was war, their actions said, so let the world burn: I've no fear for earthen hells for the road to heaven is paved in the blood of the unrighteous!

I'd almost have felt sorry for them, if not for what they did. I don't know what kept them going, what fears fed the fires of their endless hunt and inspired all the atrocities they committed in the name of their absent god. But whatever they had it wasn't faith. Faith means sacrifice, about forgetting yourself and your desires. Faith is about letting go of your fears and putting your hopes in something beyond your understanding, about trusting others even when you cannot trust yourself. Faith is about that constant struggle to make the world a better place, even if it's not one you'll live to see.

I am not a faithful man: trust has never been an easy thing for me to lend. For all my boisterous bravado I am not without my hubris, but I know faith when I see it. Amid the mists of memories, a torch was raised. A broken Sword that shone with light more radiant than a thousand suns that sung with a holy choir, a puppy cloaked in a silhouette of silver, and a Knight who was no less a Warrior without his Sword: even Sandy could count herself among their number. These crusaders disgusted me, how dare they claim to call themselves Knights as their actions spat upon those worthy of the name

Righteous fury built within me, rising forth as if to say " Look!" "Look at yourselves!" "Look at the earth around you and see the world you've set aflame!" "These fires were lit not by the whims of magic but the hubris of man!" And as if I were a blind man standing before the sun, I opened my eye and saw. I watched as the once noble men who had stood before me were twisted into dogs of war: eyes blinded by fear even as their minds were mangled by chains of blue. The world below me rippled and shifted as the pristine earth was burnt and scarred: the rifts on high weeping tears of blood and fire upon the ideological trenches winding across the mud below. Of my companions, I saw little as I fell onto my knees, a woman held in Varric's hands, and a glimpse of seraph wings. I blacked out then, as a wolf's paw closed my eyes, falling into haunted sleep: nightmares on every side.

When I woke up, I was in the makeshift triage pavilion we'd set up at the crossroads. Rising quietly, as not to rob the actual wounded of their rest. I slipped out into the predawn gloom to walk the empty streets. Not the safest thing, sure, but I needed some time to think: processing the fever dreams that had been seared into my brain. The more I thought, the more I realized that these were no mere nightmares, no mere products of indigestion or a disease of the mind, but a vision of truth.

What kind of life had I led, that I had faced such horror's eye to eye and come out swinging? What kind of person I had been, to so eagerly stare into the abyss: knowing that I would not forget it's gaze? Who were these people, these heroes, who had so often stood beside me: fighting beside a man who did not even know their names? What is a man but the sum of all his experiences? The little I knew of mine terrified me to the core.

I had to see, I had to know, and so I took a breath and, holding my unmarked hand before me I looked. My duster sleeve was clad in a plate, the hand within was ice. but while it was cracked and scarred. While it was marked by time and toil: stained with blood and broken dreams It was whole. And it was human: and that was enough. Releasing a long held breath I blinked and closed my Sight, raising hand and head alike to greet the coming dawn.

Mother Giselle joined me not long after, as we worked to turn those battered hovels into a refuge for those cast aside by war. And while I've never been all that comfortable around people of the clergy, she had a quiet grace that helped put my troubled mind at ease. While she clearly believed that I was the herald, or at least the next best thing. She didn't try to force the title upon me (cough, Leliana, cough) or attribute it to false humility. She just accepted that reasonable people can differ and got down to the business of planning how we could stop the rest of her order from bringing an exalted march down on my head.

Part of me will always resent the chantry for trying to throw me to the wolves in those early days, but they didn't really have many other options at the time. Chicken little was right, the sky was falling: and they were doing their best to bury their heads in the sand. But that wasn't about to change anytime soon, if I wanted them to see the world as it really was then I would have to do some digging. I was a threat to them only as long as they considered me to be an outsider. I would have to meet them on their own terms in order to give peace a chance.

By this point, any hope I might have had of remaining a simple consultant were getting slimmer by the day. Harry Dresden: Rifts sealed, demons vanquished: no love potions or other entertainment, was ever going to work out. But as I started to see the real impact we were having on the region it didn't seem like as big a deal as it used to be. From those who have much to give, much is required, and these people deserved all the help I could muster on their behalf. I might not be the Herald they were looking for, but that didn't mean I couldn't raise a call to arms. Hope's a powerful thing, and when it came to the rifts, fear was quite literally the enemy. If this green flare embedded in my hand could provide the hope they needed, if it could light their way through these dark times: then who was I to tell them not to follow?

(A/N

After much deliberation, I have decided to officially make this a Harry/Cassandra story. It wasn't love at first sight, it's not going to happen fast, it might not work out: they both have a ton of baggage getting in the way of things even if they do realize a mutual attraction. But that seems to be the way the story is going and i'm curious to see how things turn out.

Normally I would reply individually to reviews, but Phant0m5's concerns about the first law of magic brought up a few things worth sharing

First off, Dresden does have his magic. the first law of magic still applies even if he can't remember it, there's a reason I gave him a spear to take on mortal threats. I have plans for specific points for these things to come back into play in a big way.

Secondly, Harry's not in Kansas anymore, the Trevelyan Mage Inquisitor I'm playing alongside this fic kills dozens if not hundreds of people with magic while still remaining more or less sane. Harry's magic is something fundamentally different, that's why he hasn't really taken note of the spells Solas has been slinging around, and even once he knows he has it there will still be a lot of kinks to work out.

Lastly, any ideas about what nickname Varric would give Harry would be much appreciated. I've got a pretty big role planned for him in a chapter or two. Currently the best idea I've got is "Cowboy" but thedas doesn't really have the concept for those.

As always, thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed: it always puts a smile on my face when I wake up and see that some new person has followed/favorited my little tale. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions feel free to leave a review or toss me a PM! )