The Aeducan-made-Warden looked around. It was a building, kind of church-like, a familiar sort of place. Like he'd been here before. Something was off, but he just couldn't quite put his finger on it… there had been a demon, and then… nothing? But that thought was put on hold when he recognized the fellow on the raised dias.
He stared at a familiar bearded human of his acquaintance. There might have been some open-mouthed gaping, actually.
"Duncan? How the hell are you-?"
He made the logical connection. "Am I dead? If that demon slit my throat while I was napping, I'm going to be pissed. So much left undone… I haven't even manage to get into Morrigan's almost-nonexistent pants yet."
Well, sort of logical. He was having an off day.
"No," Duncan assured him gently.
"I mean, and this is not the afterlife I was promised. 'Return to the Stone,' shyeah right. Not that that sounds like much of a promised reward, but - oh, hey, is this one of Alistair's jokes? Did he put you up to this? Not funny -"
"No, this isn't a joke," Duncan said, exasperation getting through his warm, caring facade. "The war's over. We won."
"Now, see, I don't remember that part at all," Aedan Aeducan protested.
"You're the big hero."
"That does sound like me, I guess…" the dwarf allowed, scratching his beard.
"Things are perfect and they shall be that way forever! Now that the darkspawn are dead, there is only one thing we need to do. We," Duncan went on, "the ancient and mighty Order of the Gray Wardens, shall sing songs about how great everything is now and how much less awesome things were in the past."
"Okay, okay, that's it. I have to cry foul on this one. Whoever-you-are, have you ever even met Duncan? He had his moments, but the man was a hard-ass of epic proportions." Of course, Aedan had wanted to be a Gray Warden anyway, since most of his nobles had been far more annoying, and far less amazing in battle to make up for it.
"Do you think I wanted to be one of the premier warriors in the whole country and the last, best hope against the Blight? No!" 'Duncan' went on melodramatically, "All I really wanted was to be a bard!"
"Look, if you're not going to take this seriously, I'm leaving," Aedan huffed.
"I can't let you do that, dwarf," 'Duncan' declared.
Aedan spun around and lashed out with a chain mail-reinforced, full-strength punch at dwarf height. He'd discovered all kinds of useful tricks up on the surface.
'Duncan' went down, almost crying. Whatever the imposter was, it was apparently not immune to a cheap shot to the stones, the dwarf noted.
"Hey!" complained mook number 1. "I thought dwarves were supposed to be big on honor and fairness and all that crap!"
Aedan was busy putting an arrow in the writhing Duncan from point blank range. He looked up.
"Oh, sure. We dwarves are all about honor. Just not against demons. Or darkspawn…. Or humans. Really, we're just honorable to other dwarves." He thought back to his younger brother's plan to commit fratricide and pin the blame on him, sentencing him to what amounted to a slow execution in the Deep Roads. One of these days, he'd have to go back and kill him for that. It was on his To-Do list, right after 'Save Ferelden.' "And not always that much."
"A shame, that," Aedan mused as he put an arrow through the whiner's eye. "Ah well. Now where was that door?"
Well, the glowing pedestal thing apparently did the job, transporting him to some other place, alone with another human. It was a place much more obviously wrong than Duncan's building had been. It was like the land was cut off, sectioned, separated from everything else by a wall of fog.
Aedan was ready to nut him.
Niall spoke very quickly. "Woah, hold on! I'm not one of the demons!"
"Hey, I remember you! Well, your body lying on the floor like a dead thing at the feet of a greater demon." He paused. "You know, that afterlife theory is just getting more credible all the time."
Niall went on with his backstory exposition, ignoring him. "The demon traps all who come here in dreams they cannot escape from. I have been wandering this nightmare realm for a lifetime, finding only mad dream things and rivers of flame, locked doors and non-Euclidian geometry. It controls this section of the Fade utterly -"
Aedan waved his arms. "Wait, wait, wait. This is the Fade? How did I get here?"
"Were you listening at all?" Niall said, exasperated, "The Sloth Demon -"
"Yeah, I meant, how did I get here? I'm a dwarf. Not being able to touch the Fade is kind of our thing. Well, that and these bitchin' beards." He stroked his beard comfortingly, reminding himself of its presence on his face.
"I don't know, I'm a mage, not a… a…"
"Person who studies the Fade and related subjects amidst the greatest repository of magical knowledge in the country?"
"Y- no… Moving right along, my companions and I were heading to the Harrowing Chamber with the Litany of Adralla to assail Urdred."
Aedan noted in passing, "I'm going to kill the hell out of that guy for sticking me in this stupid place with only you for company. And for releasing the demons and blood mages into the Tower, I guess."
"That's… one way to put it. Anyway, blah blah Litany blah blah Urdred big words talky talky guardian demons are you even listening?"
The Aeducan exile started paying attention again. "Sure. Kill demons, free comrades, Litany of Adralla, you betcha."
"Well, okay then."
"You maybe wanna come help me get us out of here, or…?"
"No," whats-his-face said dramatically, "I've tried for so long without success, I just don't think I could -"
"Fine, whatever. By the Stone, you're a downer."
A little further down the only path that cut through the eerie void and beyond a spooky portal thing, he found a Rage Demon locked in an epic struggle with… a mouse.
It was fairly large, as mice went, but that was about it. It was a mildly retarded-looking fight.
"Help!" said the mouse.
Aeducan shrugged and pulled out his bow. He'd heard weirder.. well… okay, not really, even Duncan's 'Hey, drink this demon blood or I'll kill you' pitch was less weird. But he liked demons less than mice, so he was okay with it.
When the demon was dead, the mouse said, "You couldn't have come, like, three seconds sooner? Jerk. Anyway, take my power. I shan't be needing it. Now, I die! Blargh!"
The mouse practically exploded, more blood than such a small thing should have puddling around it.
He blinked. "Well, thanks, I guess, weird talking mouse. I'm sure the ability to turn into a plague-bearing rodent that can't even handle a lesser Rage Demon will come in handy all the time…"
He looked around, but there was no ghostly portal or glowing pedestal or other exit… but there was a mouse hole.
"Huh. That's fairly convenient."
He also noticed in passing that he was talking to himself.
"Bugger. It starts with talking to yourself, then before you know it, I'll be as mad as a human."
The mouse hole spit him back out in a different place, so he wandered around fighting lesser demons until he found himself standing before Niall again.
"Hi Niall. Found that mouse guy. He's dead now. I'm going to go see what else is out there."
"You are so much braver than I," Niall marveled.
"Yeah, I'm great. Bye, Niall." Aedan didn't want to spend more time in this place than he absolutely had to, and certainly not with the whiny human mage. He was getting out of here if he had to kill everyone in this dream world to do it.
He touched a pedestal and moved between areas, a very peculiar feeling indeed. He was getting a sense of how big this area of the Fade was. The Fade was supposed to be huge beyond measuring, but this place probably didn't have more than half a dozen of these sectioned off little lands to it.
He didn't know magic, so he had no idea how to escape. Better to just find that demon and murder him. Indiscriminate murder was always a good plan B, when it wasn't his plan A to begin with.
This new place looked like the site of a huge battle in a succession of samey stone corridors. There was no ceiling, just a pale sun in a fog-yellow sky.
Pretty soon he was up to his eyeballs in darkspawn, big armored hulks with a mean disposition only matched by that rank odor. The little ones fell easily enough, but those bigger ones required more than one arrow to put down unless it was a damn lucky one.
He missed his human shield. That was, his fellow Gray Warden and friend Alistair, he corrected himself, as if worried the other Warden happened to be nearby, reading his mind.
Before long he had waded through enough Genlocks and Hurlocks to put paid to a small village of the things.
"Talk about dreams imitating life," he sighed.
He called days like this Mondays. Followed shortly by Demon Tuesdays and Brigand Wednesdays.
Eventually he found another human hiding behind a pillar from more darkspawn. He was whispering, "Must be quiet! Shh! They won't find us!"
The last true Aeducan resolved to get out of this place as quickly as possible. He did not want to be that guy, mumbling to himself and rocking back and forth.
"You know, darkspawn do have ears. They can probably hear you just fine," he pointed out.
He noticed that both the human and the darkspawn were kind of pale and see-through, but they died all the same.
He really did love violence. It solved so many of his problems.
"You saved us! You killed them, you did!" The fellow looked normal enough now, covered in one of those heavy suits of mail the Templars liked to wear.
Aedan preened a bit. There had been far too little adulation in his life since he was exiled from Orzammar.
"I give you my wisdom! And now, I wake!"
The knight vanished.
Aedan blinked stupidly at where the knight had been. "You can wake up? Then what the hell am I still doing here?"
He looked around surreptitiously. No one around. Good.
He moved over to where the knight had stood, and intoned, "And now, I wake!"
Gave it a few second, just to see if anything was going to happen.
"Well, damn it."
A/N: So, first chapter of a two, maybe three-parter, written mostly just to address a few weird bits in the canon, and because it amused me. Tried my hand at the tongue-in-cheek style of Sarah1281, whose Dragon Age dwarf origin stuff is worth a look.