Inspired by Florence + the Machine's 'No Light, No Light'. May benefit from listening while, before or after reading. Depending on personal taste of course.

The noise in the square is intense. She has been to festivals before but her eardrums don't recall anything like this in Highever. It is mildly intoxicating, like a heavy Nevarran redwine, or (so she imagines) lyrium-spiked water. It rolls through the streets like blood. Denerim is a body in rapture, and for a moment it strikes her as perverse, surrounded as they are by stone ground into powder and the poorer parts of the alienage still swept by incontrollable fires.
But perhaps that is the exhilaration of survival. However that sort of hysteria has become foreign to her. A dull edge.
Something brushes softly agains her mind. She really ought to remember.
But the noise! It drowns out everything. The shouts of praise gives her a headache. The hysterical sobbing nauseates her. She is acutely aware of the absurdity of the spectacle, briefly imagines that Morrigan is watching it all right now from above, shiny mirror in her magpie claw and cackling. She looks down at her hand and sees that it is shaking.

I wish I could remember.
It hovers on the edge of her minds ear, like a chain of words. When she dreamt, and the bile green fogs of the archdemon threatened to take over and become all of reality, the words would make it all go quiet. There would be stillness, then, and no sobbing, no screaming. Her own or otherwise.

She needs it now, but it isn't there.

Alistair will be crowned king soon. She made them do it. But she worries that it might not have been enough. The marriage seemed the swiftest route to stability, to keeping everyone sufficiently happy, and Loghain's bloodymindedness have been put to better use. But still. The internal relations of the new royal family will be strained, and the queen has the prospect of having to go to the bed of her dead husbands brother to contend with.
Better to make sure Loghain is far away. better to write the First Warden and suggest a transfer to Weisshaupt.
And what of the Arl of Redcliffe?
He wasnt satisfied. That much she could tell.

And she realises then that she is drowning the noise of the outside with noise of mind, and the former is nothing compared to the latter.
What am I doing, she wonders, planning the lives of multitudes, deciding successions while everyone else are offguard, so busy just being happy? I, who despised Arl Howe and saw everything I loved destroyed at his hands.
What a grand puppeteer you have become, Imogen Cousland!

Heaviness hits her. She feels tired. Where is the cake, she recalls someone asking dryly, when the ceremonials at the castle were over.
Indeed, cake would be good now. A thing of the earth. A simple pleasure.
And with that she remembers. not one, but two things at once.

The first: the words of the prayer. She didn't understand them of course, and always forgot to ask what they meant. But she recalls them now, and the strange growl that in her mind is so intertwined with them as to be inseparable.
There is much that I do not understand here, he said. No one seem to be content with who they are.
She was defensive at the time, so sure she was right and he in the wrong. And he didn't press the matter.
It strikes her now, a Landsmeet wiser, how right he were when he said that. Unforgiving, riddlespeaking, but certainly right, in a sense.
And yet, contrary to all she was ever told of the zealotry of the follower of the Qun... He never pressed the matter. Not once.

"Imogen Cousland, Hero of Ferelden, accept this as symbol of the undying gratitude of the People..."
She thanks absentmindedly, noting that the Queen's speech sounds as smoothly rehearsed as always, as carefully sincere as only practice at a court full of untruths can shape a voice. The prize is a wreath of flowers of some kind, a forced folksyness. It was comissioned, no doubt, with the preferred royal deliverer of such products this same morning. None of those young girls bound it. Certainly, they have been busy enough searching the rubble of their homes for belongings, bodies of lost ones, and the rubble of their voilated chastities for any salvageable fragment of dignity.
Many, she considers dispassionately, will have to be put down yet in the days to come, when it turns out that the taint itself has been spewed into their bodies.

And yet, this carefully commissioned still-life.
The Hero of Ferelden, the Queen and her King next to her (in that order), and the undyingly grateful people, who apparently choose to symbolise their gratitude with something as ephemeral as a wreath of flowers.
As still-lifes go, she judges, it isn't a very impressive one.
It is as she scans the sea of cheering, halfmad faces that she realises what she is looking for. It should be so easy to find but she looks and it isn't there. All the faces are white.
"...Excuse me..."

Suddenly she's on the brink of panic, jumping off the tribunal that they erected for this whole exercise, and starting off, half running. She notices that Alistair's mouth opens as if to call at her, in surprise or insult – the way their friendship has been going since the Landsmeet, it is probably the latter. He is, however, silenced by one pointed look from his new wife. The Queen doesn't miss a step, as the crowds part to let the Hero of Ferelden pass (the first time that day the title pays off to her advantage). As she leaves the plaza behind, Anora is already launching into a praising of the modesty of the Grey Warden.

The side alleys are thronging. Soldiers cleaning up, huge bonfires of darkspawn corpses encircled by Denerimers, madly cavorting, inbetween consumption of booze in huge gulps. She is wondering where they even got it from, when a group of young men pushes past her, the oldest probably no more than eighteen winters old, chasing each other down the street, all bravado and dreams of the future. The one leading the fray is wearing a ladies' gown, emitting high-pitched whoops as he goes, his comrades mock-chasing his skirts.

The obvious, death-defying play on identity brings a brief smile to her face.

Women can't be warriors?

The thought makes her face darken. She picks up speed again.

No, Alistair didn't take it well. She recalls his petulance when she let Loghain live, and the bitter taste of her own disappointment in him. Does it matter to you, she yelled at his back as he went, that killing Ferelden's most seasoned general on the eve of battling the darkspawn might potentially destroy everything Duncan fought to protect? Everything that all Grey Wardens die for?

And as he didn't turn or even slow down, she'd added under her breath:

Who told you that being a Warden was glorious? It certainly can't have been Duncan.

And she'd meant it. Duncan knew better. For all the short time she knew the man, that much was clear.

We are gray, not white. That is why we can go where others cannot. And because we can, we must.

We haven't flown the skies for many ages, and no gryphons remain to carry us above the dirt. Alistair, the Warden king. Anora will not bear any children by you.

But Morrigan may bear a child that will be sibling to the Queen.

Morrigan. For all her lack of social graces, she was always truthful. Even about those motifs she knew might displease others. Morrigan knew who she was... wherever she is now.

Parshaara. Why do you pester me?

Why indeed, Morrigan. Why the satire? What were you trying to say?

She looks at the sun, slows down suddenly. Walks aimlessly hither and yon. The streets down here are narrow and labyrinthine. She must be near The Pearl.

"Imogen!"

She whirls around and it's Wynne. Of course it's Wynne, the only one who will call the Teyrna of Highever by her first name as were she a wayward child. What a Senior Enchanter is doing down here is anybody's guess, but then Wynne always had an uncanny ability to find you if she wanted you to be found.

Or maybe it is because she needed to pick the elf assassin up. Zevran. He stands next to her, as happy as you please, and whatever has prompted Wynne to agree with the prospect of most certainly having to put up with his worship of her ample bosom, it must be something important. Something really really important.

And she, Imogen, stands frozen as if overcome by a sudden heaviness. Go, a voice with in her urges. Go! It will be too late. And as her wizened self-appointed counsellor is just about to launch into something clearly very important for which the person of Imogen Cousland, Hero of Ferelden is probably indispensable, she does something she has never done before, and her mother, the old Teyrna of Highever would have scolded her something awful, but there is nothing to do about that now.

She interrupts an elder.

"Wynne...! Yes, sorry I'm interrupting but this is very important. Have you seen..."

And she grows weak again, drawing a deep breath, and continues, "Have you seen the qunari. The Sten. Our Sten."

Wynne looks taken aback, puzzled, Zevran suddenly inquisitive. She takes note of both and plunges onwards:

"It's just that... I think there has been some terrible mistake. One that I need to mend before he goes to tell the arishok about Ferelden."

A terrible mistake.

A terrible, terrible mistake.

Wynne furrows her brow, trying to process this unexpected turn as quickly as possible. Zevran looks back, one eyebrow arched as if to say, what do I know of foreign affairs, you are the Fereldan noble, I am just a knife-ear, remember?

Wynne cocks her head, looking with that dreadful examining expression of hers. Her tone, when she answers, is almost a question in itself.

"I last saw him this morning, at Denerim castle. The ceremony. He was saying his farewells. He said that he had already spoken to you?"

"You studied some qunari culture at the Tower, right?"

"Yes, that's right?" Wynne nods tentatively, the furrows in her brow deepen.

"So... I have a question. Please, it's urgent."

And she asks Wynne about the second thing she recalled while the crowd was shouting. The second word that she never asked about, that for some reason it seemed so very clear that she shouldn't ask. It was for her to understand, or not understand, and no clarification would have been forthcoming, even should she have asked for it.

You are not as callow as you seem.

A trust severely misplaced, she now fears.

Wynne answers her question with absentminded scholarliness, as always.

Zevran, more perceptive than Wynne (contrary, surely, to what the latter would prefer to believe), widens his eyes as he overhears the answer. And he stretches out his arm and points towards the docks, without a word.

She runs. The Hero of Ferelden, the Teyrna of Highever, the stupid, stupid imekari runs, and breath is stuck in her throat, because the sun is already high on the sky.

Along the way she is close to toppling dockside workers with goods, several times. Life is already going on down here, near the sea. Its waves rise and fall, she supposes, and never stopped, never changed, even while the archdemon bellowed out its hatred over Denerim from the tower of Fort Drakon.

And while she runs, the does what she has neglected, or avoided, all that day. Maybe other days, she is not sure, though the more she thinks of it, the more she can't believe how such a great space could be occupied, so near her, without her even realising. Until the space was empty.

He argued. He was the only one, out of all of them, who ever cared enough to question her. She remembers Haven, and the light in his strange eyes when he challenged her. And how she always felt, afterwards, that he'd let her win because for some reason he decided he had to. Just has he challenged her because he had to.

She'd yelled at him several times, and he never responded with anything but that cool, correct demeanor of his. No one could sound as flat as him. It was like he always trusted that his words carried their own weight – he didn't have to do anything except utter them.

She thinks of their Sten who wouldn't say his name. Whether he had any is anyone's guess – she knows so little of his people, for all she knows they might not have any names beyond their functions, though somehow she doubts it.

Then she remembers: he had approved when she told him that Dog was just named Dog. A name she had chosen when she was so small she could probably had sat on his shoulder without him noticing, and as she recalled they had all laughed at it back home, because why hadn't she called it Connor, or Dane, or Shredder, or Valiant.

But he liked Dog. She'd approached him, later, and asked why, and he had said:

'It is who he is. Wild things do not have names'.

And he had gone back to sharpen his blade with the big whetstone he had apparently brought with him all the way from Par Vollen.

This way and that way she turns, stopping to question one who seems to know what is what down here, then taking off again, with even more speed than before.

As she reaches the quayside, she sees a sail. The breeze is carrying the ship swiftly on, it is already far, far out. Too far.

She closes her eyes, squeezes them shut. A small person, the only still point in the hustle and bustle on the winding Denerim quays. A lonely dot in a place where everyone are so in the right, they never reach out; and because of that, never understand a reached out hand when they see it, but only that it is bronze and not white.

She squeezes her eyes shut, and remembers, a hurricane of silences and meanings and soft spoken mentions of tea and incense.

And Wynne's puzzled answer to the question.

Kadaan? A very interesting word, dear. Very few of our kind have ever even heard it used, and only when overhearing conversations between qunari. It is generally agreed that it means 'that which is held close to the heart'. Why are you asking?