Running in Circles - Prologue

1. (Altus)

Leto dreamed of cities.

Not the gilt and spires of Minrathous, that island that stood angry and proud enough to turn the surrounding sea to glass. He dreamed of stone and grasslands and foreign rain, and a rawboned boy with dust-blue robes kilted past his knees and slowing, sticky blood on his back.

He was breathless and mad, grinning as he he stumbled, though Leto could hear no one in pursuit.

"You'd think—" the runner was talking to himself, words garbled and turn from his mouth, but still clear to Leto in that strange way of dreams—"That they'd be more imaginative."

Leto woke. He always did. He had seen that boy run in circles for years. Seen him caught and stripped and confined, only to try again, his brown eyes growing harder and wilder as both he and the dreamer grew, the scars he wore changing with seasons and escape attempts until they mapped his body like any Tevinter slave on the lesser open markets. Leto, breathing hard from another's efforts and feeling his own unmarked back sting against the cot as the waking world took him back, could only shudder.

Varania stirred in the next cot, her breathing soft and body in the tense half curl that any slave allowed their bodies, for easier waking. Leto tried not to move.

Don't get caught this time, he thought, letting his eyes close and seeing shadows of the running boy as he fled another city, another keep or tower. He did not know when sleep took him again.

Pressure. So much pressure.

A body where it shouldn't be, filled by something that simply should not: desire and rage and cold power that was filling the house, pressing chill fingers to sleeping bodies and searching—always searching.

Leto was caught in its wake, pulled and streaming—bodiless, voiceless—as the presence ignored locks and doors and walls, the Master's own fire-based protections sputtering and dying all about them.

Leto could sense his master. Not his body-though he knew, somehow, that it was sprawled on one of the long couches he favoured, loose and young and with a human boy under his arm. He sensed the heat of his magic, his mind. The banked heat of cinnamon and sulfur turning slow and dim in the cold.

He tasted deathroot—saw, in an unsettling lurch of double-sight—another's hands—grinding and stirring and letting three drops of something coat every cup the master would touch.

Leto imagined the fire going out. What the chill and the greed might take from this house with no one left to guard it. He saw it flicker, felt himself-but-not-himself surge forward to meet it, and tumble into poisoned dreams.

"Wake up," he said, hearing his voice splinter and change into a thousand other seemings—dream family and lovers and enemies, all part of an unknown dreamscape and speaking Leto's own words. "Something is in the house. You have no time."

"Who is this?" The Master's voice, slurred and baffled.

"Who…who dares—?"

"Someone dared poison you and invade your house," Leto snapped, his voice not his own. Desperate—frightened—sure that, if they did not all die here, his life would be forfeit if the breech was real.

Leto thought of the pressure he had felt and the taste of the unknown power. He startled to see it rise up before them like ink, sketching a half-known figure in Magister robes.

"Wake," he whispered, his voice briefly cracking and small and just his own. "My Master, please."

Castor Aubericus, Magister of the Tevinter Imperium, woke to find a desire demon smiling at him from the foot of the couch, frost already blocking the windows and turning the air hard in his throat.

Its death was a screaming, painful thing, his shock and anger ripping enough heat from the Fade to consume it in a fierce rush, leaving only faint bluish traces behind. Deathroot was a sweet pain in the back of his throat, but was fading. An elf lay crumpled to one side, fine hair spilling over the floor. He shifted under Castor's eye, groaning and turning a wary, dark face to his.

Leto. The eyes would have named him even if the rest did not.

Castor watched awareness creep into those eyes, saw them widen and then close in sharp, desperate panic. He flung himself forward, forehead touching the floor.

"I…I do not know how I got here," he whispered. He did not apologize. His whole body spoke and said there was no point.

Castor sighed. He looked at the demon. Looked back at the child.

"Tell me, Leto," he said. "Do you dream?"

"I…"

"I think you do," said the magister, slowly. "And I think that you may have saved my life."

Leto looked up. A shaking, deliberate breech of protocol. He then looked, without flinching, at the demon; at the runnels of water that dripped down the inside of the windows.

"Altus, they would call you, if you were not a slave," Castor mused. "Dreamer. Somniari" He felt a smile twist his mouth.

"I bet you're not even tired. But I do not need to tell you that life is unfair."

"You are my Master," the boy murmured, still not looking away. "You do not need to tell me anything."

Castor laughed. He was alive. He should have beaten cheek out of this scrap of flesh years ago. And if he had, then perhaps he would be dead now. The cowed, after all, did not dream. There had been no Dreamer in Minrathous for twenty years. Denarius would scream and spit.

"It is good, I think," Castor said, standing and reaching out to pull Leto to his feet. "That liberati can be apprenticed. Don't you agree?"

2. (Liberati)

The boy stood before a judge, lips pinched and hands clenched at his sides.

The audience could see how he shook, the small-boned Elven slave who met the judge's eyes but could not keep still. He shifted from foot to foot. Canted his head, his body leaning slightly toward his master's taller, still form. Even here. Even at this time.

"Magister Aubericus. This is…an unusual request." Someone snickered from the back of the audience chamber. Castor Aubericus did not flinch.

"The elf has too much power to be left as he is, Justi."

"Ah, Castor," Denarius added words to his laughter, drawl clear in the vaulted space. "You just don't know to handle them. Never have."

Castor glared. The judge sighed, still looking at the skinny offering before him, his family standing only a little farther back, eyes lowered and bodies over-still.

"Far be it for any of us to tell another how to keep his slaves," he said, "But you wish to apprentice him. Yourself? This seems excessive."

"It is necessary," said the younger magister, shoulders stiffening as Denarus strangled laughter in a cough. "Even freed, Leto was mine, first. I will oversee the training."

"To what end?" Danarius again. "To make a magister out of him? Stupid boy. He'll be nothing more than Liberati trash and trouble, no matter how you dress him up."

Castor watched the boy shudder. Remembered the fierce, bitten words of the week before, when he had taken Leto to his workroom and told him of his plans.

("I will free you, so I can teach you," he'd said. It had seemed simple enough. "Magic is only for free men."

"Not without my family." Leto had glared, and Castor winced to think of cracks forming in the Fade around them, Demons that would be drawn to bright, clean anger.

"Mages get what they want," he'd said. "And if you're to make a mage of me, I will have my family."

"Fierce little wolf, aren't you?"

Leto had said nothing. Verania and their mother came with them to the Imperial Court the next session-day. )

"Honoured Justi," Castor said, turning his back to Denarius. "I stand by my decision. Will you give me yours?"

"Don't hurry me, boy." The old man snapped, eyes narrowing and one hand clenching about his staff. "Just needed to make it clear that it's your own resources you're squandering. I will free the elf, if you stand as guarantor. The elf and the rest of his brood."

The clap of a gavel, the scurrying of scribes, and it was done. The new Liberati went very, very still.

"Charys, mother of Leto and Varania. Freed. Varania, sister to Leto, daughter to Charys. Freed. Leto—"

"—no," said the child. "Not that name. Not any more."

The assembly stared. Castor swallowed a hiss. The judge merely sighed.

"Well?" he said. "What will you be, liberati mageling?"

"Fenris," he said. "My name is Fenris, here."

NOTES:

The structure of this AU is from the lj_kinkmeme. The (glorious, mad) prompt requested, among other things: magister!Fenris-who began life as a slave, but not to Denarius-and slave!Anders, who is neither possessed by Justice nor a Warden.

This story is going to contain all of that, along with lyrium; kittens; a headlong flight to Kirkwall; Justice where you least expect him and, I hope to all that is holy, a reasonable attempt at keeping things in character. Wish me luck!

The amazing cover art is a comission made from the lovely enife on deviant art. [ ]