The Exalted Plains never truly slept.
Even in stillness, it remembered war.
Broken banners whispered in the wind.
White stone graves stretched across the horizon like the ribs of a dead empire.
The air carried the scent of old magic and older blood.
Elyanna walked alone.
Not as the Inquisitor.
Not as the Herald.
Just as a mage trying to hear her own thoughts without a war table in front of her.
Her staff was slung across her back.
Her hand — the marked hand — rested loosely at her side.
The Anchor was quiet.
For once.
She stood near the lake where the light turned silver in the afternoon and let herself breathe.
For a moment she was not responsible for anyone.
Then the mark burned.
Not the sharp flare of a normal rift.
Not the familiar pull she had learned to master.
This was—
violent.
She dropped to one knee with a strangled gasp as green light erupted across her palm.
"No…" she whispered.
But the sky above her was not turning green.
It was tearing open in red.
The rift did not form.
It ruptured.
A vertical wound split the air, jagged and unstable, bleeding crimson lightning that crawled across the clouds.
The Anchor reacted like a living thing.
Magic lashed out from her hand without her willing it, striking the ground, the air, the rift — searching for something it could not understand.
"This is wrong," Elyanna hissed through clenched teeth.
"This is not the Fade—"
Then gravity broke.
Four shapes fell from the rift.
Not gently.
Not like bodies thrown from a height.
Like people rejected by reality.
They struck the earth across the field in different directions.
The rift collapsed instantly.
Gone.
No demons.
No lingering tears.
Only silence.
And the Herald of Andraste kneeling in the dirt, her hand still blazing with uncontrolled power.
For several seconds she didn't move.
Then instinct took over.
She ran.
The first body she reached was armored.
Black hair.
A dagger still in hand.
Human ?
Alive — barely.
The second lay farther off — a woman in strange clothes, muttering even in unconsciousness.
The third—
Elyanna slowed.
Blue fur.
A tail.
Her staff was in her hands in an instant.
"By the Maker…"
The creature was breathing.
Not a demon.
Not anything she had ever seen.
And yet…
not hostile.
The last one—
Elyanna stopped.
Her breath caught.
White hair spread across the grass like frost.
A young woman.
Armor unlike any make in Thedas.
A round amulet at her throat she didn't recognize.
And something else.
Something that made the Anchor surge again so violently that Elyanna cried out and fell beside her.
The mark blazed with unbearable heat.
It wasn't reacting to the rift.
It was reacting to her.
Elyanna forced herself to look.
The stranger's eyes fluttered open for the briefest moment.
Golden.
Not elf.
Not human.
Not anything she knew.
For that single blurred heartbeat, they looked directly at each other.
Not as enemies.
Not as allies.
As two people bound to something far larger than either of them.
Then the girl lost consciousness again.
And the Anchor flared so hard Elyanna thought it would tear her arm apart.
Soldiers arrived minutes later — summoned by the magical shockwave.
They stopped dead at the sight.
"Herald… what are they?"
Elyanna didn't answer immediately.
Because for the first time since the Conclave—
she didn't know.
"Secure them," she said at last, voice hard, controlled.
"No one touches them without my order."
Her eyes never left the white-haired girl.
"Alive."
SKYHOLD
They were not taken to the infirmary.
They were taken below.
Stone.
Iron.
Guarded.
Watched.
When they woke, they woke separately.
The blue one first — confused, disoriented, speaking in a language half the guards didn't understand.
The loud woman second — immediately demanding ale and accusing everyone of kidnapping.
The pale one — the vampire, though they did not yet have a word for it — woke silently and tested every shadow in the room before anyone realized she was conscious.
And the white-haired one—
did not wake at all.
But the Anchor reacted to her presence even through walls and distance, pulsing like a second heartbeat inside Elyanna's hand.
Leliana's agents filled the halls like ghosts.
Cullen doubled the guard.
Cassandra demanded answers.
Josephine demanded diplomacy.
And Solas—
Solas stared at them as if someone had handed him a living impossibility.
In the interrogation chamber, the tension was a drawn blade.
Elyanna stood at the center.
To her right: Cullen, armored, unyielding.
To her left: Leliana, silent and watching everything.
Behind her: Solas, eyes fixed on the unconscious girl as though she were a doorway.
The others were brought in under heavy watch.
Not chained.
But not free.
"Who are you," Cassandra demanded, "and how did you come through a rift that is not of the Fade?"
Sofia blinked at her.
"Inigo," she whispered loudly, "why is the angry Seeker lady shouting at us?"
Inigo lifted his hands slowly.
"My good and respected interrogators, we are equally confused."
Serana said nothing.
Her eyes were on Elyanna.
On the mark.
On the way the two magics reacted to each other across the room like opposing storms.
Her vision swam.
Stone ceiling.
Iron sconces.
Armored figures.
Not a battlefield.
A court.
Her body tried to move — failed.
Then she saw her.
Tall.
Composed.
Robes of command.
Magic coiled around her like authority made flesh.
Pointed ears.
Ciri's breath stopped.
Not fear.
Memory.
Marble halls in Cyrodiil.
Soft political voices.
Her father bowing to gold-robed elves.
Hands on her shoulder — Stand straight. Smile. You are an asset.
Her entire body went rigid.
The woman stepped closer — not aggressively, but as someone used to being obeyed.
The soldiers shifted subtly.
Respect.
Command.
Power.
The girl with the Mark.
The one in charge.
Ciri forced herself upright despite the pain.
Every instinct screamed at her to look away.
She didn't.
She met Elyanna's eyes with the kind of formality that was colder than hatred.
The voice that came out was weak—
but perfectly trained.
"Your… title?"
The question landed like a blade.
Not confusion.
Protocol.
Not an insult.
A refusal to acknowledge.
Cassandra stiffened.
Cullen's hand moved to his sword hilt.
Leliana watched with new interest.
Elyanna answered evenly.
"Inquisitor."
Ciri gave the faintest, exhausted nod.
Not bowing.
Not yielding.
The gesture of one noble forced to recognize another — and nothing more.
Then, with visible effort, she looked away.
"I will not be used," she whispered.
Not to Elyanna.
To the past.
The Anchor detonated in light.
The other girl's chest rose with a sudden, sharp breath.
For a moment the two forces — the Mark and the Dragonblood — recognized each other.
Not allies.
Not enemies.
Equals.
Solas stepped forward, voice trembling with something dangerously close to awe.
"This is no rift accident," he said softly.
"This… is convergence."
Elyanna straightened.
Her expression returned to the one Skyhold knew.
Controlled.
Commanding.
Unbreakable.
"Until we understand what you are," she said, meeting the white-haired girl's hostile gaze without flinching,
"you remain under Inquisition protection."
Not imprisonment.
Not freedom.
Something far more dangerous.