So I wrote this spontaneously to extrapolate on one of my planned Inquisitor's family past.
Please read and review! Its short but sweet.
"...Pa, why are we leaving?"
Its hotter than usual.
The Antivan sun is melting the world today, golden fields and rolling hills broiling in a miasma of stroke inducing heat.
The clay road is crackling under the onslaught, dust mixing in the air when heavy footfalls scatter the loose scales.
A family walks alone on the trade road, just the three, no ox or mule to carry their belongings. Doesn't much matter though, as they're pretty much oxen in their own right, such as the qunari are.
The woman, the wife and mother, is silver in the sunlight, mostly from the sweat building on her skin. She wears cotton, a white shift and brown trousers too short for her and rawhide boots taking on the same rusty color as the dirt she walks on.
She has white hair in a loose braid and gold eyes that crinkle at the corners when she smiles, those gold orbs rolling when her husband gives her a long and far too endearing side glance.
"Because, uhm... because of the drought, we're going south to the ocean." The father responds to the child, noting how the wife shakes her head, the gold thread wrapped taut around her horns like rings shimmering in the sun. A pleasing contrast to the white purple of the ivory, and matching the color of both her eyes and the locket around her neck.
The father and husband admires her for a moment longer, grinning when she notices and finds herself rolling her eyes for the third time in the past five minutes.
But she lingers as well, smile pursing her lips, and he recognizes the sadness that permeates her whenever she looks for too long.
He knows it is because of the scars, the little pock marks where once his lips were sewn shut, white-hot twisting wires across his ribs and arms, a combination of self-harm and beatings by his Arvaarad masters.
His skin is darker than hers, his eyes softer and smile more true; he knows the darkness and knows too that it is behind him because of her. But sometimes, she looks into that darkness when they both lived it and fears it greater than what any of these Dathrasi could ever do to them.
The child riding the father's shoulders tugs gently on the purple horns filed short, careful to avoid the white strands of hair tied back in a cottontail of a tress.
"The ocean? What's that like?" He asks curiously.
The son is a combination of the two, white hair tied back like his father's and silver skin like his mother. Little thorns protrude from his temples, dark purple like the father and silver eyes unlike the both of them— an ancestor's gift.
He has blue warpaint smeared experimentally across his face, an attempt to mimic the paint on the father's face, unsuccessfully given the fingerprints all over his face and neck and the paint that wouldn't wash off his hands.
Because, like a child, he was embarrassed to tell or show his sleeping parents until after the paint had settled into his skin.
Living with his mistakes was a fine lesson either way and a punishment in and of itself.
"You've seen the ocean, Ashok." The mother chides, hefting the sack slung over her shoulder into a more comfortable position, the other pack on her back hindering that.
The weight on her hips doesn't help either, and if it were in her nature to complain she's sure she would have started hours ago.
But its not, and its foolish, so she doesn't.
Neither does her husband, a similar bandolier of supplies slung around his waist and across his chest, the added weight of a child with tired feet doing little to help the sweltering sun and long walk.
But she does find it in herself to beam proudly at the memory of the child walking until blisters were starting to bubble all across his feet before he asked to be carried.
"Kadan." The husband's warning is low and the affects instant, a prickle of energy shooting across her skin when she faces where he gestures. She sees the meandering group of dark figures on the side of the road, loafing on the cool stone walls, talking loud enough that the family could hear bits of conversation from here.
She stops a half-step forward, the husband does too, and for awhile, no one talks.
They watch, waiting.
A wandering caravan stopping for luncheon was one thing and not a threat; wandering bandits that mimic a caravan however... one of the men notices them and whistles for attention, the boisterous gents quieting, white teeth flashing and eyes narrowing in pleasure at the sight of a lone family traveling.
Bandits it is.
The man that noticed them heads out to greet them, she notes the sheathed sword at his side and rare fire grenade at his hip.
Other than that he is unarmed, a poor choice.
But it seems he does have some sense, as when he realizes they are not human, elf, or dwarf, he hesitates, and stops a respectable distance away.
The child is quiet and watches with wide eyes, the father seems less impressed but gives his wife a soft look before she steps forward, stopping also a respectable distance from the man.
"You're in our way." she states bluntly and the man seems surprised that she speaks at all.
By now the other men have noticed that something is wrong, perhaps it is the white hair, the horns or the fact that she stands near two heads taller than this human.
What could possibly give her away?
But she waits because it is easier to clean off an annoyance than blood.
Two more men are starting to back up the first, wise or merely curious, with them are two sets of daggers tinted green with poison. Each have scars in their faces and clothing and she stops them a few yards back with a look.
"Shall I repeat myself?" She returns to the first, scowl firming her expression effectively.
"You are in our way. Move."
This seems to snap the man from his stupor, a toothy grin pulling his lips back and revealing a mouth stained brown from chew.
"Never seen a woman oxman before." The man's eyes glint and travel up and down her figure with an appreciative hum in his throat.
For that, she kills him.
He is not fast enough or skilled enough to dodge or parry her, her knife in and out of his throat in an instant and thrown across the distance to land with a thud into one of the others chest.
When they both drop the rest of the men jump into action, but the third is close enough for her to deal with now.
She grabs him by the hair before he can run, yanks him back and grips him by the skull and the hip, lifting him, screaming, over her head and throwing him into the bumbling men charging her with their weapons stuck awkwardly in their sheaths.
They tumble and one accidentally cuts two of his fellows in his venture back to his feet. Her elbow smashes his nose and he drops his blade into her hand which she sheathes into his stomach, kicking him off it and back into another pair of his charging comrades.
Husband and child watch amusedly as their wife and mother deals with the 'caravan', a combination of agility and strength and plain inability on the human's part ending this squabble quickly.
The remaining three men still standing are booking it across the fields, the other six either dead or moaning in pain, rolling on the ground like toddlers.
They flinch but do not protest when she crouches and goes through their pouches, relieving them of their blood money, a fine whet stone, and a gold ring she slips onto one of her child's little horns, making him grin.
The husband and child follow her to the heart of the camp, leaving the humans to writhe in their stupidity. She takes the sacks of food, exchanging them for the worn ones on her back, shifting some provisions around to fit the most in one pack before leading her family away from this embarrassment.
Once a safe distance away, the father touches his wife's arm with a ghosting of white snow, the smallest cuts she received from the scuffle healing to non-existence once more, as if a reversal in time. She gives him an appreciative smirk, squeezing his hand endearingly and wordlessly continues their journey to the coast.
"Ma?"
She starts when her child speaks after a good mile further into their trek.
She looks up to the little one riding his father's shoulders, glistening in sweat and grimacing in his stiff canvas shirt.
"Ashok?" She replies.
"Will you teach me to be as fast as you?" she doesn't miss how the husband's eyes flash to her in question.
But she smiles because she has the freedom to.
She is a woman who fights and who cares for her own child and not a conclave of nameless faces to be thrown against the winds of submission.
The darkness is still there, their black pasts, but the child is not tainted by it, and she would see it never reach him.
"Of course, kadan."