"Maybe I don't belong here," you say once, looking over the carcass of an animal being carved into sustenance for too many mouths. Your dagger is slick in your fist, weary of death around the handle.
"Not yet," replies the keeper, whose name you could not pronounce yet. Their hair is greying at the temples and you think of your mother, her fingertips permanently rendered insensate from years slaving over Tevinter textile, working contentedly in sunny glades beside kind elves and sleeping soundly in weathered aravels. The elderly mage lays a hand withered with magic upon your arm. "But you are one of ours, da'len. Do not doubt that."
You earn your vallaslin after years of purposefully forgetting who you are and the Dalish do not doubt you. They accept you in a way you can't bring yourself to do, and in a way, you are grateful. Your mother learns to say your Dalish name. You learn to call her mamae.
"Maybe I don't belong here," you admit but not in those words exactly, eyes tracing the outline of a map with too few pieces in play. A chorus of heads turn to you, considering; you didn't ask for an answer to your doubt, but you are given them anyway.
"Perhaps with time, that will change," Cassandra hopes. She is a hard woman, but she is a woman of faith - and you know that there is nothing harder, nothing more difficult to keep, and perhaps that is why she is as strong in her beliefs as she is the harshness of reality. Perhaps it is better to be a stone, unmoving, unflinching.
"I must agree with Lady Pehtaghast, Herald," Josephine reconciles, her words as genuine as they are means to an end. A diplomat is always sure of themselves, lest they be swept into the machinations of others; the Antivan bends and sways to the demands of others but always by her choice, always by her choice. Is it, then, better to yield?
"I can understand that," Cullen sympathizes last. His hands rest heavy on the pommel of his sword and you cannot help but recognize it when you hear it with your knife-sharp ears: the erosion and the weariness of a battered self, not sure what to do with something you're not entirely sure of. You do not doubt this in him, but you doubt he truly understands.
Leliana says nothing, as much an answer as the alternative. Your words are only a vocalization of her own doubts, adrift in a churning sea with little confidence to weigh anchor. But it is external constancy she requires, for she has no fear of drowning when she is so prepared to weather the storm for a dependable port, herself an immaculately waterproof, untouchable vessel.
The map they have procured ends before it can encompass you; hard borders on all sides, details left invisible for the sake of convenience. What is not there need not exist until needs must. You resign yourself to being defined by someone else's limits. As you always do.
"Maybe I don't belong here," you murmur, watching shemlen mill around the tents and iron-clad soldiers playing at war in well-trodden snow. The elves keep their heads down, and you are tempted to follow suit. The mark upon your hand and the marks upon your face keep your spine from drooping like an untethered string, bowing away from the breach in the sky.
"Come on, it's not so bad," chuckles Varric, feeding wood into a hungry fire. He is a dwarf so unlike dwarves that you cannot help but trust him. You are an elf unlike elves, unlike shems, unlike anyone. You are marked and marked and then marked again, a mudfish dropped into a rapid stream dropped into the ocean. He takes your silence in and exhales loudly, hot breath expanding in the cold. "Don't worry," He says, voice crackling like flames. Whatever happens, you're with us… whoever 'us' is." He laughs. "You'll do fine."
You send a raven to Keeper Istimaethoriel and your mother, and prepare to depart for the Hinterlands. You learn to answer to Herald. Your Dalish name is unused, traded for a title and a surname that marks you as surely as the magic writhing in your hand.
"Maybe I don't belong here," you bite back, rolling over and away from a series of glyphs promising unhappy things to the first footfall it takes. The mages are relentless, firing off sharp and wicked things to rend and flay, magic lights stuttering and panicked. The templars forces are heavy by comparison, slow and deliberate destruction, ever chasing the high glare of their swords and shields. The afterimages leave spots in your eyes that mottle the sight of their bodies crumpling under your blades.
"It will take time," sighs Solas, dispelling one of Varric's paralyzing concoctions from a gash in your hairline, reading the question that lingers in your eyes after each battle, after every instance of flitting between allies, trying to find your place and failing. Everything he knows is subject to bias, his source the fade apparently built on the fallible convictions of the masses; the very nature of his certainties are inscrutable, but he finds that more familiar than the People, the Inquisition, than you. You do not understand, this comfort with uncertainty. "In the end, it does not truly matter whether you belong," he says, distantly, then elaborates, "What matters is that you act as if you do."
A moment of reprieve after sacking the main Templar camp has you leaning over a sheltered cliffside, watching water dash itself endlessly on the rocks. Mist fans over your skin and you're reminded of a clinging humidity in your lungs, that you left behind for a spray of water to relieve your inflamed face, that you left behind for something that makes you ache because you are unable to consolidate these memories into anything resembling solace.
You leave, uncomfortable with the droplets that slide under your collar, but you do not show it.
"Maybe I don't belong here," you laugh, nursing weak ale and a growing inclination to believe that you are doomed not to get along with any actual elves in Haven. You're not sure why you expected to, as no one but you is considered exceptionally Dalish and the camp is filled with anything and anyone but - elves included.
"Ugh, don't start with that shite," grouses Sera around a mouthful of overcooked turnip pie. She jabs the three-tined fork at you, disdain in the jut of her mocking tongue, and you think you might understand why she hates who you are and who she might have been if you were a little more careless. But that isn't who you are, and Sera is too... something to be pushed aside as merely careless, and you want to hope. So you tolerate the flinch of your own something when she waves her limbs so near your head in a grand sweep. "I've had 'nuff of that elfy piss coming from you elfy people," she sniffs. "Had it once from you, now. Once's over already, yeah? Alright? Heard it before, don't care, don't start with it."
Your tools are rusted where they hang on your belt - spare set snatched off a body between flashes of battle - but you remember where to place them, where to push and where to prod, and with a little frustrated commentary thrown at it for good measure the weathered lock in the underbelly of the chantry gives in. The air is ripe with age and a permanent chill radiates from the stones, but a pilfered, threadbare blanket and a single lit candle confirm that your preferred company is still the deafening roar of silence.
"Maybe I don't belong here," you want to scream, stepping into a room that is far too gilded to be anything but a trap, your borrowed finery hanging on you like a poorly-fitted disguise. You can do little but react to what you're confronted with, a magister in everything but her allegiances offering a mutually beneficial exchange of resources; you are aware, so aware of the gears turning relentlessly under the placid front of this thing you are Herald of, but you find yourself out of your depth. But that is expected of you, and you can at least fulfill those expectations.
"Nonsense, darling," Vivienne smiles, taking it all - you, your inexpertise, your false front, your vallaslin, your mark - in stride. It is as easy for you to play the part as it is for her to see through it; she is not so unaware as to assume you are what you appear to be, but you don't think even she can see beyond the edges of the map - the map that cannot encompass all of you - so perhaps you do have an edge, here. "I look forward to working together in this. There are great things in your future, my dear."
In the Fallow Mire you learn quickly which of your companions watch you and which watch out for you, and adjust your blade accordingly. Madame De Fer sets a half-dozen undead ablaze and unguarded for you, your barrier flickering out under the epicenter of the inferno, but it's the one entombed in a casket of ice across the field that you drive your dagger into; the feel of its bones shattering under your weight rattles your teeth as Cassandra carves through the fray you've just left behind, and you don't have to look to know Solas is already casting, frost wreathing his coattails, his magic falling over your skin like a familiar fog.
"Maybe I don't belong here," you know your stance is saying when Cremisius Aclassi catches you at the chantry doors, your panicked heart choking on the dust of Tevene over his words. He pauses before introducing himself, and you know he has seen it, and in that moment you are not the Herald. You root your feet to the ground to prevent yourself from wilting by sheer force of will; five minutes and a fortnight to the Storm Coast and back, there is an encampment of mercenaries sprung up in the snowfalls, just outside the walls of Haven.
"Boss," says The Iron Bull, nodding his massive head every time you pass by, and that is apparently all he has to say on the matter, despite the uncertainty in your shoulders and the unease that still chases your step, sometimes.
"I had to convince him to contact the Inquisition, you know," says Krem about a week into their signing on, smile on his face slight, and you're not sure what to make of that. Bull snorts, mutters something about mouthy 'Vints, and the lieutenant chuckles. "He won't admit it of course, but I don't think he regrets it."
Neither of you bring up the curse you hissed when he first stopped you, perhaps by unanimous agreement - it would not do for the Herald to be heard speaking in Tevene, no matter how startled they or how short the phrase. For some weeks you retire to your quarters repeating Dalish phrases until the words dissolve into meaningless phonemes, until one night you pause, weary and disillusioned, wondering if it is worth the trouble.
"Maybe I don't belong here," you think through a haze of fury, as Dorian brushes off your anger with as much ease as he brushes the snow off his shoulders, bowing away from confrontation with a sense of self he was born with while your mother, and your grandmother, and the roiling of your stomach fold neatly into knots of silent, impotent rage at being forced to search for something no-one can give them. You apologize for your anger, to appease the tremors that threaten to topple the column of your back that is not entirely because you are Dalish.
"Don't be absurd," Dorian waves a hand as though the matter could be swatted away like so many unwanted flies. He is everything you expected him to be, and everything you expected he wouldn't be, and he is sure of it all. It chafes at you, you who wear the mark of the Dalish and yet will never have lived Dalish long enough to ever champion it with the surety that Dorian Pavus champions Tevinter. "If anyone should apologize, it would be me. Believe me when I say I did not mean to offend you."
Your hands are numb with cold as you clamber through Crestwood's slick landscape, collecting as many silent injuries as you do requisitions. You notice only when you pause to relinquish the fruits of your labor at camp, when you have time to breathe and to feel for the frayed edges of your fingers where your blood has been leached away by water and death. It is not visible, so you do not alert Solas. It does not hurt, so you do not pour a poultice. You feel you don't really care.
"Maybe I don't belong here," your fears find purchase on the tongue of a spirit, and you are too tired to act on the unease that it inspires. The Frostbacks are furious, needling breath whipping at what fires the mages have been able to keep alight, bruising with ice where it cannot coax the warmth out of the surviving.
"Silence has never felt so lonely before," Cole murmurs, eyes too blue and too wide and far too near. Voices rise outside the makeshift shelter where he is crouched next to you, gusts of transient mortal fury whisked away into meaninglessness. You swallow, tongue dry, and the sky just beyond the edge of the fires is like a yawning void. "Creators, help me," the boy goes on, "but I don't even know what that means; me, marked, meaning muddled, the mirror's mask unfamiliar, each reflection too apart from the other, an incomplete picture. Vitae benefaria, mamae," and you start, heart beating a line into your fractured chest, "'Arvehn, ir'lath, ma'revas,' 'Herald,' 'Lavellan,' but am I truly?"
You fall silent, fists forming, your something prickling in the corners of your eyes. He reaches out before you can recoil and places a scrap of velvet as black as the night in your hand. You stare at the thin silver star embroidered in its center, threads shining like strands of your mother's hair, her hands so sure she doesn't need to feel to know where to move her needle on an endless black canvas - even in absolute darkness she never doubted there was a net of stars waiting for her at dawn.
The scabbing line over your thumb rasps against the fur.
"You should go to sleep," he whispers.
The deterioration of your fingerprints, under the steady accumulation of untended, insignificant scars, is as steady as it is inevitable. Eventually you begin to lose tactile function on the pads of your forefingers and elsewhere, calluses thick over the bones of your fingers where they wear on the hilts of your daggers, Dalish leather thinning with each passing death. One day Harritt finally breaks down the things without your notice and you barely recognize the weapons he returns to you after the fact, nodding at your hands.
"Finally found a use for that odd schematic you brought back a fortnight ago. A good bearskin wrap ought to do you some favors."
You study the acute angles of the pommel, something about the pattern of the leather, the curve of it made to curl comfortably against your palm, all of it decidedly not Dalish, giving you pause. To your hands, however, the change appears to be a non-issue. The skin between Varric's eyebrows wrinkles when he eventually discovers the hidden latticework of raised tissue on your fingers, his hand brushing over yours as he hands you a makeshift grenade, but he, like Solas, does not comment. No one else notices. Even you stop noticing, after awhile.
"Are those gilded hilts on your daggers?" Dorian leans over, shifting his staff to the crook of his elbow. You allow him to take one from you and watch, idly, as he turns it over in his hand. "Curious. Did that cranky old blacksmith clobber these together for you? If I didn't know better I might have sworn these were Tevinter... it's very close. Not something I'd expect to see here, of all places."
"Maybe it doesn't belong here," you agree, inspecting the blur of a reflection the metals make of the marks on your face.
Dorian goes very still for a moment, then carefully hands you back the dagger, cold sunlight and your Mark glinting wickedly off the blade as it returns to your hands. It takes you a moment to realize what you've said. It takes far less time to understand why Solas has turned his head to consider you both, a question in his eyes.
You shrug. "It's probably better off where it is, for now."