Part I

He had smiled, clapped him on the back, made some vulgar comment about his sister. Anything to choke down the tide of bitterness that threatened to overwhelm him. Who would have thought Faren, of all the casteless dusters, would be chosen by some cloud-touched surfacer to be a Grey Warden?

Already he looked like some high-up in the Warrior caste. He held his head high, brand and all, the Aeducan mace the mad surfacer had given him clutched in his hand. It was hard to believe that only this morning they were roughing up poor merchants in Tapster's.

Now Faren would go, and Leske would stay. He knew the way the story went. When a duster managed to claw his way to the top, he sure as hell didn't take one sodding look back. No pithy connection was worth anything compared to the chance to get out of Dust Town.

And it wasn't even as if they had a connection, he reprimanded himself furiously. It was just sex—nothing more, just animal need to pass the time, no different from getting drunk at Tapster's besides the lack of a bill to pay afterward. Leske knew where he stood, and that was currently strata below Faren.

He turned to go, ignoring Rica's questioning glance and the glares from the assorted Nobles and Warriors. Back to the underbelly of the city, back to beating up defenseless sods for petty crime lords and drowning himself in the dust.

"Wait."

Even Faren's voice sounded more dignified now, the deep harshness authoritative rather than brutish. Leske kept walking.

"I didn't go through the Provings and kill Beraht on my own. You'd be cheating yourself if you let that one get away."

Leske stopped in the middle of the road. What? The surfacer said something in response, but he couldn't hear through the pounding of his heart in his ears.

"Either we both go or you leave here without a recruit."

"You do realize you'll be executed if you stay."

"Then you had better take the two of us."

Leske turned around.

This wasn't how it was supposed to be. Had Faren been cracked over the head during the Provings? What kind of mad duster spit on the hand that would pull him up? What kind of casteless whoreson looked back?

Faren looked him straight in the eyes.

"Did you even consider that I don't want to throw my sodding life away for a bunch of surfacers?" Leske all but snarled at his oldest friend, his mind spinning. It was wrong, all wrong.

The blond bristle on Faren's upper lip twitched as the other dwarf smirked. "Nope."

"You nug-brained bastard," Leske snorted, and the breath turned into a manic chuckle. He couldn't help it; Faren may as well have been six feet tall. He knew that if he were the one under Duncan's wing and if Faren were the one standing behind, he would have left without a second thought.

But here was Faren, standing with his arms obstinately crossed, looking at Leske with a mix of emotions he didn't even want to try to decipher.

The surfacer sighed with what sounded like exasperation, but his eyebrows were raised in intrigue. "Very well. We'll leave at once."

Leske wasn't half the warrior Faren was and they both knew it. Even when they were Beraht's enforcers, he had always stayed behind the cover of Faren's two-handed battleaxe, darting forward only to land a few harassing blows with his daggers. It wasn't a matter of strength—Leske was built along the same burly lines as the other dwarf—but of nerve.

Faren had an air of perpetual calm about him, even when he was hacking his enemies to bits or surrounded by hopeless odds. Some would dismiss it as casteless stupidity, but they were wrong—what Faren had was confidence. Despite everything, there was a brutish pride in his steady stance, in his level voice, in his half-lidded eyes.

And that was the fundamental difference between them. Somewhere along the line Faren had failed to internalize the lesson every casteless learned in Dust Town: you are dust and even the Stone shall reject you when to dust you return. As much as he hated it, the mantra governed the way he lived. If returning to dust was all he had to look forward to, then he would sodding make sure to avoid it for as long as possible.

But Faren, the mad nugcap, had always been separate from the usual duster nihilism. His madness had almost gotten the pair of them killed on more than one occasion; Faren would talk to a guardsman or Warrior Caste like he would to any other duster and it had fallen to Leske to supply more than the usual amount of kowtowing and wheedling to extricate them. Yes, there was no question at all that Faren was completely mad.

Perhaps his madness was why Faren now almost casually pushed his way past the tall grasses of the Korcari Wilds, gazing up at the sky with calm curiosity while Leske clung to the shadows, terrified out of his mind. The three humans with them said nothing of it, but already they looked to Faren to lead the way as they took their places behind them. The blond dwarf looked perfectly at home, and if not for his pale skin it was impossible to tell he hadn't lived on the surface all his life.

Then the earth was trembling, a huge wound like a gash ripped open and darkspawn were pouring out, surrounding them and screeching at them. They reeked like rotting death and by the Stone they looked like monstrous corpses—

Leske froze, his daggers dropping from his nerveless hands and burying themselves in soft earth. He cursed whatever worthless criminal ancestors he had and wished that he had never followed Leske out to die under the endless black sky.

"What are you doing?" Faren roared, swinging his axe into the gut of a Hurlock twice his size and slicing it neatly in half. "Pull yourself together, man!"

An order: he could respond to that. He rushed to follow it and scrambled to pick up his daggers, Faren fending off the wave of darkspawn at his back. Still shaking, he took his old place in Faren's shadow, finding some comfort in the familiarity of striking after the brunt of the other dwarf's axe.

Finally, inconceivably, they stood victorious. Even as the two human recruits and Leske struggled to catch their breath, Faren knelt to collect the pooling blood in the four vials Duncan had provided.

Leske couldn't do this, wouldn't do it, didn't even want to try. His hands still shook in abject terror; he still felt the rancid reek of the darkspawn on his face. If this was the life that awaited him, he would have been better off in Orzammar.

To his left the trees thickened, the tangle of branches no doubt making it difficult for one of human height to traverse easily. It would be that easy to slip away from the back of the group and perhaps the humans might even think that he had been carried off by some darkspawn or wild beast.

He toyed with the idea of asking Faren to come along, but he dismissed the thought as soon as he had it. Faren was beyond him, had always and would always be better, nobler. Here the duster actually stood a chance at glory and greatness, abstract and distant things for someone like Leske.

Well, they had had their fun, Faren and Leske, but now it was time for the weaker side of that duo to make his exit.

He edged slowly away from the group as the humans watched Faren screw the caps onto the vials. Once he got to a decent radius, he broke out into a full run.

The human Alistair sputtered in shock and even Faren looked taken aback. Leske focused his eyes on the growth of trees ahead, not looking back. The crashing of heavy armor and the rustling of leaves came hot on his tail.

He caught his foot in an errant root and splayed gracelessly facedown into the mud. Faren immediately pinned him down in a tackle that left Leske winded.

"What do you think you're doing, you bastard?" Faren shouted into his face. "What are you trying to pull?"

The other dwarf's usual calm countenance was twisted with rage and, to Leske's horror, hurt betrayal.

"I thought we were friends," and Faren's choked emphasis on the last more hinted at something more.

It was too much to handle: the darkspawn and the terrifying openness of the new world above them and Faren, that blighted madman, and Leske wanted nothing more than to crawl back into the familiar dust.

"I can't do this," he admitted, wincing at Faren's viselike grip on his shoulders. "Why did you even want me to come with you?" He glared at the other dwarf. "I never asked for this! Sure, we were dirt in Orzammar but at least we had our lives!"

The punch was on his jaw before he even realized it was coming. He spat blood onto the damp grass beside his head. Faren's fist trembled, held in the air.

"You idiot," he hissed, and Leske's gut wrenched as he saw liquid burning in Faren's eyes. That was not ever supposed to happen. "Don't you see? This is our chance. Back in Dust Town we'd eventually turn on each other, or worse. You know friendships don't last in the streets. But here on the surface we don't have to live like that."

Faren offered a scarred hand to help him up. "I didn't want to lose you, Leske," he muttered in an undertone, and for perhaps the first time Faren Brosca looked hesitant.

"Damn you, Brosca," and Leske pushed aside the hand.

Instead he got up on his own two feet and stood level with Faren, their noses almost touching. Faren's heavy breaths were hot on his face, and for the longest moment they were silent.

"I need you," and Faren raised his hands, not quite resting them on the shoulders he had only just held in a death-grip.

"No you don't," Leske growled, but his fear had passed. What replaced it he couldn't tell, but the idea of running away had abruptly lost its appeal.

Faren opened his mouth to say something and Leske crushed his lips, still bloodied from Faren's punch, to his. He was rough and brutal and absolutely intoxicating.

They broke away, neither looking into the other's eyes.

There had been an invisible but firm line in their relationship; they might spend an otherwise lonely night rutting but they had silently agreed never to make anything more of it. And in the underbelly of Orzammar that had been perfectly fine—sentiment had no place in the streets.

Leske felt the line crumble beneath his feet as he pushed through the bush after Faren, slowly following him back to the humans. The other dwarf spouted some lie about Leske having seen some stragglers, and though Alistair raised an eyebrow he made no comment and merely led them onward.

The human Jory was blubbering, backed against a wall.

"I have a wife! A child on the way!" his hand fumbled for his greatsword. A fatal mistake. "There is no glory in this!"

Duncan spit him like a pig on his own longsword. His body joined Daveth's already still corpse on the flagstone.

Leske watched him bleed out impassively. Such a human would not have been useful anyhow. He had everything to lose, little to gain.

How lucky for Faren and him that they had nothing in the world but each other's backs to watch out for.

Duncan handed him the chalice. The blood was dark as Orzammar ale. With a smirk in Faren's direction, Leske drank deep.