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Aria doesn't have a witty quip ready for the templars when they finally open the door and let the surviving mages out. She gestures vaguely at Zevran and says "injury kit", then marches off to explain the Redcliffe situation to Grand Enchanter Irving. Under the circumstances, she thinks that counts as pretty stellar leadership.
The decision to spend the night at the circle is met with unanimous support, even though nobody but Wynne actually likes the place. They've left Redcliffe alone for more than three days at this point, but it can't be helped. One does not do battle with a sloth demon, defeat a powerful blood mage, and un-possess a child without taking at least one night to recover in between. Aria figures they might as well take advantage of the fact that the circle has actual beds, and so the party rests.
The rest of the party, that is. Aria can't sleep until she's made sure that everyone else is all right. Zevran shoos her away with a smile and a tiny wave of a still-broken arm, assuring her that he's been through worse. Wynne smiles tiredly and promises that she'll be fine after a good night's rest. Morrigan and Leliana, for once in their lives, present a united front and insist that Aria worry about herself instead of the rest of the party (Leliana because they're all fine, really, honestly, and Morrigan because their resident apostate doesn't relish the thought of an exhausted commander making poor decisions). Shale's gone AWOL. Oghren's passed out in the tower's front hall. Aria decides neither of these qualify as problems, mostly because she has no desire to solve them. She walks back outside, trying not to listen to the templars and surviving mages collecting corpses. She got to two hundred before she stopped counting, and the templars are at one hundred and eight so far. Presumably it'll be a mass pyre. She should've asked Irving whether he ought to be present for it, but she has a feeling he would prioritize Connor's life anyway.
The night sky stretches wide open above her, little pinpricks of light shining in the vast emptiness of the universe. She wonders if unharrowed mages miss the starlight.
"You should not be walking."
Sten is sitting with his back against the outside of the tower, his expression comfortingly disapproving. North is curled up beside him, apparently asleep. The qunari raises a hand to indicate her injured leg. "A fallen commander is of very little use to anyone."
She means to force a smile, but the expression comes more easily than expected. "Aw, Sten. I didn't know you cared."
North whimpers without waking. Sten places a hand on his head, and the dog quiets. She wonders what sort of nightmare he's having. What does a dog fear? Hunger? Pain? Does he relive the death of his previous master, or worry about her own? Does he realize the seriousness of their situation, and dream about a world where the darkspawn win?
"I care about ending the blight," says Sten, still petting the mabari.
Aria doesn't mention it. She's tired. "That's fair. Have you seen Amell?"
"Grieving."
She's not sure, especially since it's only one word, but she thinks she detects an undercurrent of sympathy. Sten may not agree with Draconis about—well, anything, really—but he understands friendship. He understands the knife-sharp pain of loss, the gaping hole left by death, the thousand ties that are always severed when a given heart stops beating. It's the thing he wants most, those ties, the only thing that can tempt him from his duty. She knows that, now.
She has no idea what to say to him, and even less idea what she'd say if she went to find Draconis. Wow, basically everyone you've ever cared about is dead. Tough break. No, better to just give them time, and offer support if someone asks for it. "Better leave him, then. You're OK, yeah?"
Sten's face is unreadable. Not ready for any sort of heart-to-heart, apparently, at least not tonight. "I will be ready to fight in the morning. You should see that the same is true of you."
Aria cracks a smile without forcing it, as one does whenever one's qunari friend provides the smallest hint that he does, in fact, care. It's the little things that keep a person going. The big things are too painful. "Yeah, I'll do that. Soon as I check on Alistair."
Sten points wordlessly towards the shore of the island. Aria attempts a sweeping bow to communicate her thanks, which is a bad decision, as she very nearly tears the stitches out of her side. Sten makes a sound that could be taken as either reprimand or worry, and Aria laughs the pain off before he can tell her leave Alistair and see one of the healers.
She finds Alistair sitting cross-legged before the lake. He's ripping crabgrass into little pieces, presumably for want of something to do with his hands. She's not particularly quiet while she approaches—injured people in armor don't really have that option—but Alistair doesn't acknowledge her. She waits a few moments before speaking up. "You OK?"
Alistair looks over his shoulder and smiles, though not quite quickly enough to hide how lost he looks. "I could have done without the blood magic and the repeated near-death experiences, but I seem to still be here. You?"
"Fine," says Aria, barely registering the question. "Mind if I sit with you?"
"Please."
She sits close enough to reach out and touch him, though she doesn't. For a while they're silent. Apart from the templars and mages behind them, the only sound is the lake. It laps gently at the shore of the island, over and over, like a dog trying to assure itself that its master is alive and unhurt.
Eventually Alistair sighs and speaks again. "I just keep thinking about it, you know? I mean, we've seen a lot of horrible things since Ostagar, but this is... I could have been one of those templars. And there were children in there, people who couldn't defend themselves at all. It's just... I don't think 'frustrating' is a strong enough word."
"Soul-crushing," suggests Aria. "We did everything we could to fix it, though."
"We did," answers Alistair, decisively, as though he needs to believe that as desperately as she does. "You're sure you're all right? I mean, it's fine if you don't want to talk about it, but you went through all the same stuff as the rest of us, right?"
She does think about the question, this time. Her leg's banged up, but she's recovered from worse before. People are dead, but gruesome death sort of loses its novelty after seeing your betrothed gutted in front of you. Abominations are creepy, but they have nothing on the broodmother. None of these things are what Alistair is asking about.
The Darkspawn are gone.
Alistair slips a hand over hers. She can't feel any warmth through two sets of gauntlets, but the contact is something. "What did you dream about, anyway?"
The lake rises up the shore again, then recedes. She wonders whether the lake has tides, or whether that's only the ocean. Draconis had tried to explain them to her before they reached Redcliffe. He'd taken a piece of her knitting yarn and tied their fingers together, one of hers for the world and two of his for the moons. It's like there's a string attached between the moons and the ocean, so the moons pull it up when they pass above us, and down when they pass below. And sometimes the moons are together, so the tides are strong, and sometimes they pull in opposite directions, so the tides are really weak.
But there isn't really a string, she'd said, perplexed. How do you know it's not just magic?
She remembers a smile and expository wave, complete with burst of controlled flame. For a moment, he'd been in his element. Maybe it is a kind of magic. But magic's all connections, too, just pulling fire out of the fade. Everything's connections. The hard part is finding exactly where the strings are.
Alistair's hand tightens around hers, just a little.
"Weisshaupt," says Aria, finally. "I think. Um, whatever that Warden fortress in the Anderfels is called. Duncan was there. He said we'd defeated the darkspawn once and for all."
Alistair graces her with one of the skeptical looks he usually reserves for Zevran or Morrigan. "You mean you couldn't be happy unless everyone else in the entire world was safe, too?"
"Is that bad?"
"No! No, it's just that I'm feeling incredibly easy to buy off, all of a sudden. I need to get better at haggling with evil entities that want to kill me." He pauses, probably out of sarcastic commentary and still letting his brain catch up with his mouth. After a moment, he frowns. "Maker, you really want to end the blight. I mean, of course you do, but more than anything else?"
She shrugs and bites her lip, looking back to the little pile of torn-up crabgrass. "It's not really a question of what I want, is it?" Alistair doesn't respond to that, so she tries to elaborate. "I mean, uh, I don't know how much it had to do with what we wanted in the first place. It wasn't a desire demon. It just wanted us to stop moving, however it could. Not all the dreams were good ones." So Alistair and Sten get a place in the world, Zevran and Draconis get challenges that require motionlessness, and Wynne gets to despair for a world already destroyed.
Aria gets a world with no more monsters to slay, and she gives it back. She's not actually sure what that says about her.
"But yours was good," says Alistair, uncertainly. This is why she likes Sten—all she ever has to do is claim that she has a moral duty to do such-and-such, and he'll accept the reasoning, even if he disagrees with the conclusion. Not so with Alistair. He has to know how she feels about her decisions. "You're not even a little bit conflicted?"
"Not about stopping the blight," she answers. It's not like she doesn't want other things. She wants her family safe. She wants her little band of adventurers to live, at least for a while. She'd like the deed to her soul back, thanks. But with the exception of that last one, none of those things are going to do her a lot of good in a world that's overrun by darkspawn. Given that the only way to get her soul back is, in fact, to defeat the archdemon, it's sort of a no-brainer. "Like, I guess I want other things, but most of them require stopping the blight anyway."
"Huh," says Alistair. "Why did you leave, then?"
"Hm?"
"Your dream. You're the one who found the rest of us, so you must have left by yourself, right? But why would you, if it gave you the thing you wanted most?"
"It didn't," she says, without thinking, then realizes she doesn't know what she wants most. She hurries on before he can ask that question. "I mean, it was an illusion, you know? It was really obvious it wasn't Duncan. Trust me, Alistair, you wouldn't have been fooled for a second."
That distracts him for a moment, anyway. Trust Alistair not to miss a chance for self-depreciation. "I don't know about that. I was pretty easy to fool."
Aria shakes her head. "With Goldana, maybe, but you've never even met Goldana. Maybe that's why it didn't show me my cousins. It probably knew I'd pick up on the differences immediately. But even Duncan was completely different from the genuine article."
"Different how?"
"He just seemed... carefree, I guess? I didn't know Duncan that well, really, but there was this sense of urgency to everything he did. Never rushing, but never wasting time, either, like he knew exactly where the goal was and had to keep moving forward, just to give other people a chance of reaching it. He understood that the blight wasn't something you defeated in one move, without bloodshed or loss of any sort, and he believed that the cause was worth his life."
"That sounds like Duncan," says Alistair, smiling. It's not a very big smile, granted, but it might be the first time since Ostagar that he's said that name without looking like he's ripping open an old wound.
"Yeah. I mean, that was my impression, anyway. So when he started laughing about it, like the blight was some funny story to tell over dinner, I just realized that it hadn't happened that way. Couldn't've. Duncan was never going to outlive it."
I'm not going to outlive it.
It seems almost ridiculous to mourn for one lost soul, whether hers or Duncan's, when two hundred bodies lie dead in the tower behind her. You don't miss one pale star in the night sky, not when a thousand brighter ones are there to shine in its absence. But then, they're only here in the first place because of the decision to save one little boy—if they'd killed Connor and then galloped off to fix whatever's wrong with Eamon, the annulment probably would have been over before they'd gotten to the circle tower. In which case Wynne would be dead, and Irving, and all the other mages, and the trapped templars, and the tranquil, and children exactly like the ones back in the alienage. She's satisfied with her decisions, assuming Connor hasn't blown Redcliffe into a pile of rubble by the time they get back, in which case she'll have no idea whether she did the right thing.
"So you wouldn't have left, if you hadn't seen through the illusion?"
"I don't know," she says. She's a compass in a thunderstorm, spinning under a night sky that's missing too many stars for her charts to make sense, and her closest friend is looking at her like she's some kind of authority on what it means to be a good person. She doesn't even believe in good people. She believes in this, in connections, in strings, in beautiful things knitted together from pieces of broken dreams, in a world too dear to leave behind. "No, I—I think I saw through it because it didn't give me the thing I wanted most. If the demon meant to give me paradise, then it messed up when it forgot to put you there. Perfection's not worth much without anyone to share it with."
And that much is absolutely true. It leaves out the possibility that she might need monsters to slay, and it glosses over the fact that she knows in her spoken-for soul that nothing could ever be that easy, but it is true. Considering how much Alistair positively glows in the next moment, she decides that's enough truth for one night.
She's not going to get a better note to end on, so she rises. She kisses his temple and reminds him to get some rest at some point, then walks away from Alistair and back to the tower, under the stars and the moons and their invisible strings. She walks past a qunari warrior who mourns his fallen comrades, a dog with a dead master, a dwarf who left his home, and a mage who is preparing to leave hers in the morning. She walks past doors that hide a sister separated from the chantry, a witch separated from her wilderness, and an assassin separated from the people who have raised him to be a weapon. When she arrives at her own room, she strips off her armor and and flops onto the bed in her rarely-used nightdress. She stares at the ceiling a moment, still listening to the sounds of templars and mages recovering after this deadly ordeal that some of them, somehow, survived.
Can you not be content with the peace I offer?
She laughs, an unexpected sound that startles even her. She is content, is the thing.
She's so lucky to be in love with the world she's already tied to.