Notes:

Backstory for the Inquisitor here. The events of the game pick up in Chapter 3, so feel free to skip to that if that's your preference. Ellana's backstory will inform events of the narrative, but it's not essential.

Prologue I:

Winter in the shadows of the Vimmark mountains was unforgiving. We huddled together against the frost and chill, his ironbark gauntlets firm and reassuring around my leather-clad shoulders. My father was the warleader of clan Lavellan, an able hunter, and I trusted him implicitly. The blind faith of an elven child who aspired to nothing more than to follow in her father's footsteps.

I was fifteen when we went to Kirkwall. He knew an elf there, assured me that a promising partnership lay in wait. It was plausible; our wayfaring often found our clan in many backward parts of the Free Marches, and our foraging unearthed flora and fauna, minerals and artefacts that often held more meaning for others than for us. There was often a look of desperation in the eyes of our buyers, and I remember thinking, even as a child, that it felt wrong to trade a scrap of stone and false promises for a heavy pouch of coins. But my father told me that the hope we gifted to shemlen was enough, that their minds would be at ease even as the bodies they tried to cure or curse remained unchanged.

I told my father he was full of crap once.

"You're fine with it because they're shemlen." I spat at him, eyes holding his over our campfire as we returned to the woods from Wycome. "You'll take their money or their food and scam them. And when their miracle cure doesn't work because, "oh, it wasn't actually the ashes of Andraste, was it?", they'll hate elves more than they already do. What have you accomplished?"

My father did not hesitate. "We have supplies that will feed the clan for a month. What more would you have me do?"

"You are a hunter." My emphasis made my implication plain.

"We cannot live, all of us, on what we find and kill in the woods. We cannot kill everything we see and expect that there will be game again next year." He dropped my gaze, eyes turning to the would-be totem he whittled at in his hands, knife practiced and fluid.

"We cannot sully our reputation with every shemlen we trade with either."

He said nothing to my barb.

"Keeper Deshanna would never –"

"Keeper Deshanna knows what I do." He interrupted her, dark green eyes, so like my own, unwavering as they met mine. "What we do. She takes the coin and the goods because we must. This is what we are now, Ellana."

I fell quiet and thought on it. Tried to reconcile his words with the tales of the Emerald Knights, with Elvhenan and the hands that built Halamshiral in the Dales. Where did we fit, two Dalish elves around a fire, bearing the name of a lost homeland, my father marked for Andruil, claiming connection to an even older world?

I don't know if it began with that conversation, but slowly, my father's loose convictions became my own. My prayers to the Creators were ritualistic and unsure, the product of rote repetition more than true belief. I listened to Keeper Deshanna diligently, her gentle voice lilting along familiar storylines, but when my brother Elhan demanded more details, I did not understand his need. Why did it matter how Briathos died? When would we ever have a border to patrol, a nation to protect?

My father had not always been that way. You did not become the warleader on the basis of large hauls and ill-gotten goods. My own clan tells stories of his agility and his steady aim; he led our clan's movements during druffalo season, tracking the herd and slaying just enough to get by.

I am told it changed when my mother died, but my memories of her are manufactured on stories also. It is hard to think of my father, smiling and confident alongside his partner; they hunted together and lay together, she a lithe and limber elven woman with long complicated braids, a sideways smile, and a speed with daggers that outpaced even my father. I have her hair, I am told, dark, wavy if I let it, but not her cobalt eyes. Elhan and I have a dagger each – intricate ironbark blades with words of an old song strung along the surface.

We were here before the sunrise of the world.
Words without context – do they suggest that my mother was a believer? That thought of the Creators and their legacy gave her comfort at night?

By the time my memories are my own and no longer inherited, my father is a still man. Soft, but effortlessly lethal if necessary. Deferent to the Keeper and to Lorien, the other senior hunter. When he roams, he takes Elhan or me instead of a whole hunting party; we learn to hunt by emulation, but also to forage, to lie, to converse with shemlen with the perfect balance of gumption and obsequiousness that gets goods traded and food in our stomachs.

Elhan, of course, wants none of the careful negotiations or stable trade relationships. Two years my senior, he is fierce and impulsive, overrun with an infectious energy that has us disappearing in the woods, up in trees, mocking the other children who can't even begin to keep up with us. The adults smile and say we have our mother's speed, our father's strength. Growing up, we felt like we were destined for greatness.

Elhan followed the path my father had laid out; his vallaslin marked him for Andruil, and he became a full-fledged hunter at only seventeen. And when we hunted together, he told me stories beneath his breath as we snuck into a spider cave, and I felt myself belong again.

"Mythal, but she's beautiful, Ellana." Elhan did everything with purpose, and his boyish infatuations were no exception. His arm swept out, lightning fast, and the spider lost three legs.

I rolled my eyes. "Can we talk about Miriel when we're not covered in spider guts?" I brought my daggers down and into the creature's body, pulling back with practiced easy to dodge the spurt of blood.

"No, you don't understand," another two legs go flying, "She's all I can think about."

I didn't understand. Maybe it was because I was only fifteen, but I had not yet known the all-consuming passion where Elhan so frequently lost himself.

I sighed, sheathing my blades and collecting venom from the large fangs. "Just don't tell father. You don't need another lecture on the importance of joining and respectful intentions."

He chuckled, and I smiled at the memory. After he got his vallaslin, Elhan and my father were always at war. They bickered over the trite, over Elhan's overt dalliances and his encouragement of my reading and writing, and they fought exhaustively on the significant, the higher purpose of our clan, the importance of steadfast worship.

"You go through the motions and lack the meaning!" Elhan's words, accusatory and loud in the quiet of Planasene Forest. My father pauses next to me; our retreat is halted.

"Faith is a private struggle, Elhan." My father does not look at my brother, only speaks in his soft, firm way.

"Yours stopped being private the moment you started dragging Ellana down with you!" Elhan advances, grabs him now by the shoulder, forcing our father to turn.

"Please don't make this about me." I remember saying. I could never stand the heat of their disagreements. "Please, Elhan. We'll be back in a fortnight."

"With swindled coin and luxury furs, no doubt." He hisses the words, anger in his green eyes. My father grabs his hand and removes it.

"It is not for you to question my actions. Go back to the clan."

Elhan recognizes finality in our father's tone. Further words are wasted. He retreats with a smile at me, reaching out and ruffling my hair.

"I'll see you soon, da'len."

"Dareth shiral, Elhan."

It was more than a decade before I saw him again.

*
Athenril was sharp – sharp-witted, sharp-tongued, quick on her feet and quicker with her words. I think I did not truly realize what my father had committed us to until our third week in Kirkwall.

"Father," I spun and my blade made contact with the soft flesh above the collar bone. The Carta thug went down. I had killed my first shem at thirteen, part of a bandit camp we'd laid to waste. But I'd never killed as readily or repeatedly as I had in those early days in the city.

"We are not going back to the clan, are we?"

My father looked up from the pockets he was rifling through, stuffing a handful of silver coins into his pouch. His face betrayed no emotion, pale green vallaslin still over his dark eyes. He scanned my face, but he had trained me to be like him, to let nothing show because the shems would press if they read a moment of weakness in your brows, a falseness in an over-bright smile.

"No." He stood and walked over to me, placed a hand on my cheek, and smiled gently. "The clan had nothing to offer you, Ellana."

"But Elhan…"

"Elhan is happy." My father smiled wryly then. "He will make some woman happy soon enough. He belongs."

And I understood the sentiment, as we stood there in the dark of a Lowtown shanty, blood pooling on the ground beside our boots. My dark hair was mussed out of its usual order from the fray, and I felt sweat beneath my arms, along my brow. But I leaned into my father's hand, savouring the rare moment of affection.

"You didn't belong?" I'd never questioned him so directly about his own beliefs. That was Elhan's role, his combative words. My father had never answered Elhan, but my gentle tone and the promise of understanding that must've shown on my face eroded my father's walls.

"No," he dropped his hand and resumed his pilfering of the Carta men. In the folds of the dead thief's vest, he found a sealed tube. The missive Athenril had sent us here for. The Carta deal, effectively disrupted. The knowledge of the product was now ours.

"I stopped believing in the Creators when they let your mother die. If Mythal would not protect her in the most sacred of moments, I could not continue to serve." He slipped the tube into his belt, and beckoned me to follow. In the distance, we heard the shouts of the City Guard.

"And you are so brilliant, Ellana. You had all the answers our tomes could give you."

I was surprised at this, as we slinked away in the darkness, making our way back to the quarters Athenril allocated to us. I had always thought my father opposed to my love of words. I had read every book my clan had collected; I traded shem for new ones in the Free Marches markets. And when I finished each book a second time, I began to write my own, stories from my mind or from my life. This journal was the product of that surplus time and unsated urge for more words on paper.

The clan seemed to think it wasteful. I would braid intricate necklaces of leather and wool, delicate jewelry that promised a shemlen girl an exotic allure. And with the good coin I made this way, I purchased blank books and ink, fashioning quills of feathers and worlds out of words. My father was chastised for indulging my daydreaming, and in turn I was admonished, brought on more trips to occupy my idle hands with foraging for elfroot and carving obsidian out of sheer rock-faces.

"It is better we left before your vallaslin." My father swung down a flight of stairs and ducked into an underpass, finding the tight alley between two wood-panel lean-tos that led to our den. "It will be easier for you; you can even pass for a shem with a cloak or longer hair."

I reached up and fingered the points of my delicate ears. I had never been made to feel ashamed for what I look like, not by my father.

"You can be someone here, Ellana." He sat on the single stool in our hovel, and immediately began to clean his blades. "When I began to see that life in the clan could bring you no more than it brought me, I knew I had to do something."

I sat in the dirt and tried to process this news. He said it was for me, and I was touched, but I needed to also believe that this was what was best for him. I mimicked his actions, wiping down my blade, running a small whetstone along the edge, as I tried to understand that I would not see my clan again.

"Keeper Deshanna will understand." I said in the growing gloom. Our single candle burned down.

"Yes, she will."

Always observant, the Keeper had seen the deepening emptiness inside my father. She had all but replaced his role in the clan with Lorien, sparing my father the shame of removing his title.

"We will make money this way." My father's face became animated, suddenly, and I wondered if he sensed my doubt, tried to counteract it. "We will make money and buy you the finest books. You will learn and we will move out of this place." He gestured vaguely to their space, a hole in the ground with a stool, two bedrolls, and wooden boards that served as both walls and doors.

"Athenril is a crook." My objection is not so much to her character, but to the prospect of long-term illicit employment for us both. She has a charm of her own, after all.

"Athenril gave us a chance." My father is whittling now, never one to leave hands idle. He is carving the moon out of a misshapen stick. I don't know how he knows just where to chip away, to encourage a shape to emerge. "She remembered me from past dealings. She knows that Dalish hunters are fast and deadly."

"She was probably impressed that you could broker a trade agreement in five words or less," I smile at him, and he chuckles softly.

"Tight lips are a pre-requisite in the smuggling business," he concedes.

It's Athenril who teaches me to swear like a shem, drink like a dwarf, and to go for underhanded moves that the Dalish never needed. Tripwire and traps are her speciality, and knocking out an opponent before you slit his throat is simply a good business model in her line of work. Less noise, less mess, less unwanted attention.

"I don't get it." Our feet were up on the balcony railing of her favourite Lowtown pub, drinks in hand. "Why is talking about his balls a bad thing?"

She cackles and wipes the tears from her eyes.

"Oh, you precious little woodland child." Mirth shakes her shoulders. "He's theMaker. The big guy in the sky? The one and only creator of the world and all its creatures?"

"Yeah, but…" I swirl my drink in my hand, pleased at the fuzziness that mires my thoughts. "They're just balls."

"Okay, okay, I get that nakedness is not a big thing to you folks in the woods. But these are divine balls."

I can't help the giggle that pops out at her affected reverence.

"So, I stub my toe and I just yell "Maker's balls"?"

"That's the idea," the blond elf nods approvingly, crossing one ankle over her knee. "That or Andraste's tits. Depends how inclusive you're feeling."

We laughed together as the moon rose. She called me Starlight, said I was reliable, brightened her day, came in quick and disappeared like the light behind clouds. I thought it was poetic, scoffed openly, but secretly was pleased.

She's the one, scarred up arms, crooked smile and all, who taught me confidence in my body; she used to say she could sashay the pants of any guardsperson, man or woman. Watching her, I learned that the sway of my hips could make a point, get me my way when passing through the city gates. That a long, drawn-out kiss could spill secrets faster than a knife against the ribs. One of those kisses lasted longer than others, and then I was finally in on that making love business that everyone gossiped about. Athenril teased me about that, said I shouldn't get attached, but that she couldn't blame me because those rippling arms and dark eyes were enough to make any elf forget herself, shem or no shem. I smiled back, shy but also proud, and asked her not to tell my father.

She laughed. "Starlight, even your father's got to know that you're a proper woman now."

Somehow, that's what I had become, slim limbs and a small frame, but curvy in a way that I knew drew eyes. I learned to like the intimacy of another body pressed against mine, and there was a man among Athenril's contacts who I saw more than once. A part of me remembered Elhan, and his infatuations, and I wondered if this is what he meant. But his earnest words, she's all I can think about, that wasn't a sensation I could connect with yet.

Tripwires in the dark and a glance through lowered lashes – these were methods I employed when I was older, on my own, my father and I both experienced enough for solo missions. Use what the Maker gave you, Athenril always said, and, blast it Starlight, the Maker was plenty generous with you.

Athenril was alright. She was a criminal, yes, plain faced as my father was a Dalish elf, but she had her principles. I asked her about those once.

"The Black Daggers do slaves." I raised an eyebrow at her, letting it pose my question. So different from how I was raised, using my face to speak instead of keeping it a still mask that said nothing. Between my father and Athenril, I had the choice: talk with my words or with my body.

"Yeah, slaves are messy." She cleaned the dirt from under her finger nails with a dagger. "You have to feed them, keep them clean or you don't make any money. You have to find unscrupulous buyers, and that can be a whole other pot of piss."

"So it's too much hassle?" My tone conveys the words I don't utter. So you have no problem with enslaving another person?

She smiles at me sideways, eyes narrowing as she sizes me up.

"Don't play passive-aggressive with me, Starlight. I'm a flat-earred elf at the end of the day, and I know what it feels like to be stepped on by those who think they own you. I could never do that kind of trade."

I smile, satisfied with her answer. Athenril steals for the rich and from the rich. She slips contraband under the noses of guards and kills the competition when they have information she wants. I feel mischievous when I'm doing her work, but I don't feel wrong. Sometimes, I wonder if that should worry me. Elhan would certainly disapprove.

"Oh, here," her voices pulls me from my thoughts. "Dug this out of from under a dead guy for you." She bends under the table and emerges again, book in hand. Brother Genetivi, on the history of the Free Marches. My eyes light up, and I accept the gift with a thank you.

"Don't thank me. Maker knows what you find to keep yourself busy between those covers. If it isn't the smutty stuff, I don't bother." She sniffs, but I can tell she's happy to see my unabashed delight.

I never learned more of Athenril's past. City elf and smuggling queen – that was the snapshot she let me see. I idealized her in the years my father and I worked for her. And when that changed, it changed suddenly and swiftly, and my life took another path altogether.

*
The humans – Athenril says it's best to avoid calling them shems to their face, good graces and all that – have an irrational fear of magic. I found it funny at first, watching the Templars patrol the imposing tower down by the Kirkwall docks, puffed up in their armour with their notions of importance, pseudo-skirts swaying around their knees. But when Athenril snapped at me, my laughter died.

"It's a barbaric way to live." Her brows are low, her usual good humour gone. Children taken from parents, she told me, mages in a cage, forbidden love and freedom. Like slavery, but lacking even the purpose of assigned work.

Kirkwall, of course, seedy, bustling place that it was, abounded with mages outside of the circle. The humans had a word for these too – an ugly word, 'apostate' – and though Athenril employed none, I met a few in my work. Athenril realised quickly that I did not fear them the way the rest of her crew did. The mages in our clan were the highest in our hierarchy. I had faith in magic, associated it with our Keeper, her quiet ways and steadfast leadership. So when it came to missions with mages, my father and I were Athenril's obvious choice.

It was on one such mission that things went wrong. My father, always attuned to the mood in a room, knew it before I did. I saw it in the way his feet spread out to balance his stance, the way his arm slipped slowly beneath his cloak. I tensed, and the eyes of the mage flickered in my direction. My movement had been sudden and I cursed myself; sometimes I had none of my father's grace.

"Thank you for the herbs." The mage accepted the box and turned from my father. His staff, strapped on his back over dark robes, glowed softly. A green aura, eerie and indistinct. "I would have had a hard time getting them past the Guards." A hand fell into his robes and emerged with a dagger. My own fingers itched for my knives, and I tried to relax as he pried open the lid of the box we'd given him.

"We will take our payment and be on our way." My father's voice, firm and low now, with none of the tenderness he reserved for me.

"Yes, yes, so mercenary." And then the mage laughed. "I suppose that's to be expected in your line of work, no?"

He turned away from us, and then swung back suddenly. I blinked. How had it happened? He moved with the speed of a practiced assassin. With an intent neither my father nor I expected. With a knife in his hand that found its way through the weak seam in the abdomen of my father's armour.

And then his staff was out and he was chanting. Words I didn't understand fell around me as I dropped to my knees and pressed my hand against the blood. My father's blood and his face, pale beneath the green of his insignia to Andruil. I tried to stuff it back in, the blood, my fingers slick and red, frantic thoughts and useless actions as the world around us turned the colour of flames.

"Well, well." A lascivious voice and a sudden coldness unlike any cold I'd ever felt. Hands shaking, I raised my gaze from where my father lay.

There are all kinds of demons, Athenril had told me once, deep in her cups. Big ass red ones that'll smash you to bits, hulking motherfuckers that feed off your pride. And then this one. Slim and sexy, pink like lips that know just what you want .

"This will do nicely." The demon knelt across from me, smoothed fingers like snakes along his face as my father gurgled piteously. "You'll get what you want. You'll see her again, have her all to yourself ."

A voice like silk and daggers all at once, and I didn't know what to do. I lunged, not with my knives but with my hands, barrelled into its bare breasts and wrapped my fingers around its throat.

And then I was gone, hitting the ground on the other side of the room as pain blossomed along my torso.

She looked at me, appraising while her fingers snaked round my father's neck.

"Power." She hummed in thought. "But not yet. I will be back for you."

And then she ripped her hand upwards, pulled my father's throat from his neck. Licked the blood off her fingers, eyes on me speculatively.

"Mistress, are you pleased?"

"Hm?" She glanced absently over her shoulder at the cowering mage. "Ah, Quentin. Let us go."

She floated, her frame still as they glided away.

"You will help me raise her…" his simpering voice and her unearthly glow disappeared down the Lowtown alley. Blood spattered in her wake, a drip-drop trail beneath feet that dangled as she glided.

And then they were gone, and I was alone with the gore.

I whimpered. Crawled. As best I could, one arm dangling useless from where she had torn it open. I was crying; it was just so much.

He lay still, his throat a yawning maw of distended vocal cords and severed veins. Blood spattered his chin, his cheeks and I tried feebly to wipe it away. My tears on his face, the only thing I could offer to cleanse him of the evil. I stayed until the sobs left me. The pain in my arm, my side, was growing, and a part of me knew I cannot remain here. I stumbled to my knees, crawled to the mage's desk and pause.

Right on top, nestled in the box where the delivery once was, is a note in Athenril's hand.

Here's what you asked for. As for the other matter, the father should do nicely. Dalishy and spiritual, heartbroken too, isn't that what they go for?

I dropped the letter. Fell backwards. Couldn't process it. Couldn't look back at the corpse of the man that raised me, and wonder how we had let this come to pass.

"Maker's breath."

A voice behind me and I turned.

"We're too late." Another voice, deeper, coming from a Templar with brown hair and warm eyes.

"I told you my information was good, Thrask. He's a blood mage, through and through"

"Well, excuse me if I need evidence to be persuaded."

"Yes well, you've got plenty of that now, don't you?"

They caught sight of me and froze. The Templar was tall and wide, a sturdy stance and gentle expression beneath his beard. The other was slimmer, with loose chestnut curls and sea-foam eyes. He knelt next to me and held a hand out, voice softening from its accusatory tone.

"There now," I flinched at the words spoken in my direction. "You're hurt. We can help."

I looked from his steady eyes to the Templar behind him. The knight smiled gently, tried to be encouraging.

"My father…" my voice is raspy, incredulous. The sympathy in their eyes is instantaneous. The hand propping me up is slipping as the blood pools beneath my palm. "He was…" my mind flails around, not knowing what it means. "…here before the sunrise."

My world is black then, and memory retreats.