Author's Note: This story contains spoilers for the Inquisition DLC, Trespasser.

The valley was dark.

Once filled with hundreds of campfires stretched under the tall, sheer walls of the fortress, the mountains were now empty and devoid of life. The icy wind blew along the ramparts of the castle, but it did not snap in black-cloth banners rising above the turrets. No guards paced the walls, their eyes straining in the darkness on the lookout for enemies who might try to brave the murderously long and narrow causeway to the gatehouse. There was no laughter and music wafting out of the chimney and open windows of the Herald's Rest now.

Skyhold was as quiet as a tomb, the grave where Adaar buried the Inquisition.

Once she had stood in this exact spot, leaning against the crenelations over the gate, staring down the bridge, presiding over the last rites of six soldiers she had known and let die.

Ataash varin kata. Asit tal-eb.

There was no glory in this ending.

"She watches him tip the urn, ashes floating, fluttering, flying into the sky. She scans his face but she sees no pain and no anger. The Iron Bull could not decide, he let her choose, he did not question when she did not save them."

The ghost was at her side, forming out of the darkness. There was nothing left but ghosts in Skyhold.

"He said, 'This is a good reminder of who I really am,'" Adaar said.

The words had been stuck in her mind since. She hadn't thought much of them at the time, but as she stood there looking at the unmoving body, daggers still hot and bloody in her palms, they had shot to the forefront of her memory.

The Viddasala had called to him. He had drawn his axe. And he charged against them.

She did not want to kill him. She had dodged his blows, shouting, screaming, pleading for him to stop. He did not speak. He roared with each fearsome slash of his axe, always moving forward toward her.

The Anchor worsening. A dragon screeching. Qunari swarming. Eluvians beckoning. There had been no time to think. She had to act. There was no time for sentiment. The wounds cauterized and she had to continue. Such wounds did not leave scars, because they never truly healed.

A gust of wind blew the dangling sleeve of her left arm. The mark had given her power. It had earned her influence. And they all filled her hands with life and death, asking her to sort them out in proper measure. It was a job none could succeed in.

Now the Anchor was gone and the maimed arm was the least of the wounds she carried.

"I suppose I was foolish to think he was ever really mine," she said to the ghost.

Cole stood unnervingly still, his face staring out into the empty darkness of the mountains. He was barely even there. She could barely feel his presence at all. She had never trusted him or his magic, but her soul was so bare he could not help but be drawn to it.

"He meant it when he called you kadan," Cole said. "They taught him not to feel, but he could not help but feel when he was with you.

"Obviously I did not make him feel enough," Adaar said. The admission didn't make her feel any better. In the end, Bull was what he had always been. Qunari. Ben-Hassrath. Hisraad.

Although she wore the same grey skin and horns as he, she was not his kind. She had never been his kind. But she did not reject him. She did not fear him. She did not distrust him.

She had never said katoh. Even when she could hardly bear it, she did not ask him to stop. She never wanted him to stop. His job was to manipulate and he had manipulated her. And she let him.

"If I had saved the Chargers, Cole, would it have changed things?"

The ghost was still. Perhaps trying to find the answer in the world of feelings that only he could see and interpret. His face never moved, a still as a corpse.

"There wasn't any pain. He wasn't hurting," Cole said. He didn't interpret that any further.

But she took the meaning. He was Qunari. He lived as Qunari. He died as Qunari. Her assumptions that he was or wanted to be anything else were only wishful thinking. Iron Bull had told her who he was. But it was her failing that she let him in and chose not to remember. All things are bound by their being, the Qun taught. To fight against that nature is to cause suffering.

Adaar felt sick that she thought of their perverse pedagogy now, and worse yet, that its words rang true to her now as they never had before.

"You're hurting," Cole said. An easy observation. It did not take a spirit to interpret that.

"I am."

"I can make you forget." The offer was Cole's nature. He could not fight against. He could not struggle against what he was.

The Qunari, the Iron Bull, had failed and died to try to stop her and try to stop Solas. The mage was out there, somewhere, working toward cataclysm. The Inquisition, her Inquisition, had stopped such destruction once. Corypheus had been defeated. But the Inquisition had failed.

And yet, they looked to her again, to lead them again. If her nature was to fail, how could she hope to succeed?

"No, Cole. I don't want to forget," she said. "This is a hurt I must remember."

She had drawn the Iron Bull away from the others, back into the corridor, his axe smashing the stone tiles of the hall and leaving gashes in the walls.

"Stop it, Bull!" she had screamed. "I won't fight you!"

His strikes had pushed her into the corner. No room left to dodge. Nowhere left to run. His arms raised over his head, a blow meant to cleave her in two. His chest, totally exposed. Was it on purpose, she wondered?

Her feet pressed off the wall, her body shooting forward like an arrow, daggers dragging across his flank as she slipped behind him, driving the knife deep into his liver, her body slipping into the shadows, twin fangs driving through his spine, a deathblow cutting the rigid cords of his neck.

The Iron Bull stumbled backward, his axe falling out of his limp hands. Red, sticky blood pouring from the many wounds she had opened upon him. He fell heavy to a knee, ignoring the gush of blood pouring from his neck and down his shoulder.

"I'm sorry, kadan."

The words escaped his lips, followed by a sanguine rush flooding between his lips. His eye shut, his hulking muscles giving out as he stumbled back into the wall, his legs failing him, his arms falling limp to his side. His heavy hung down onto his chest. He sat propped against the wall, just another dead Qunari left in her wake.

The others found her, kneeling on the floor in a growing puddle of blood, her right hand placed lightly atop the motionless palm of his overturned left hand.

He called her kadan with her last breath.

She wanted to believe him.

But the Iron Bull was a liar.