First fan-fic. Also the first writing I've done in quite some time, so I'm sure there are gaps in my ability to get it out – all feedback is welcome. Every time I hear about Anders not liking the dark, something new pops into my head, so what we have here is a series of shorts in a small arc surrounding that. Although it ended up being a lot darker the more I played with it. I don't even own black lipstick, I swear.

I own nothing, profit from nothing, all glory to BioWare, etc.


Wisp in the Dark

I shall not be left to wander the drifting roads of the Fade

For there is no darkness, nor death either, in the Maker's Light

And nothing that He has wrought shall be lost.

-Trials 1:14

Much of his life had, in fact, revolved around darkness. Amid the sound of scurrying rats and the restless ailments of lives left behind, he struggles against the sheer volume of hypocrisy his life had shown him in this single verse. Wasn't he himself wrought by the Maker, only to have spent hour after hour, day after interminable day, terrified he'd never find himself again even when the light returned?

But the man squinting over parchment in the thin green light of the hovering wisp, quill in hand, inking protests against the private tortures inflicted in the name of protecting the masses, understands it is past time to overcome just for himself. The suffering and imprisonment of all those countless others like him has to end. Justice must be served. That intense, fiery presence at his core will not be denied.

Neither will it be served by dwelling in the darkness of his past. And yet, though he intends to close his mind to his own horrors and confront the greater need in front of him, he finds himself going back.


1. No Good Deed

He wasn't being kept. He was hiding. He was staying protected. By the end of even his fifth summer, he saw the lie for what it was. No, he wasn't hiding. He was being hidden. Fully six summers later, he still hadn't a clue what he was being hidden from.

Cellars. He could only remember two of those. Only twice had they ended up staying long enough in one place to warrant taking up an actual house, but in the time between he remembered longing for the space to stretch out, to move, to breathe.

He was far more accustomed to being locked away in closets and pantries, or the hurried shuffle to bundle him away in a half-empty crate to stay out of sight of fellow travelers when on the road.

If they can't see you, they can't take you away.

If I can't see me…

Only once before had he been discovered, just before the last heat broke at the end of that fifth summer. Having been left on the cart under a tarp while his parents resupplied – and ate, and drank, better fare than the jerky and hardtack and tepid water he might see hours later, if they remembered – in an inn somewhere along one of the better-traveled trade routes, somewhere he'd surely no longer recognize. But he hadn't yet been hardened to the way life had to be, and the darkness and heat were so close, warring violently against his newly instilled fear of discovery until they finally won out.

Throwing away a corner of the tarp, he squinted into the sunlight and simply breathed.

Of course the cart was in the open, exposed to the busy trade depot on that well-traveled road. Of course there were comments, shouts of surprise, alarm at seeing where a child had been concealed.

Back on the road, well away from the activity they had so hastily left after his discovery, he felt the lash across his back for the first time.

"What if they'd seen you for what you are? What then?"

"What if they'd thought you'd been taken already? Where are you going if not with us?"

And, over his wailing, high and piteous, "Let the boy scream! Strap ought to teach him to have a care!"


The cellar door stood open, the boy – he could scarce remember his name, for that's all he'd been now for six summers and more – told to be ready. Fire had broken out, and if it spread on the gusting wind, his parents – saviors – jailers – were prepared to move on entirely to keep their wretched secret.

But through the rare-opened door, he heard more than the fear of the flame, the scrambling of the men to line up for water. He heard a more desperate terror, urgent and pleading, a woman begging for the life of someone pulled from the blaze.

"She's still breathing! Somebody help her!"

What if they see you for what you are?

"Please! She's all I have!"

If I can't see me…

But he hadn't yet been hardened to the way life had to be, and once again who – what – he'd been told he was lost the war inside his head.

He was up the stairs and out the door, unaware he still carried the pillow he'd picked up to take on the run, past the man and the woman standing at the window considering how best to flee again, how to smuggle their burden out through the chaos. Running toward the voice that had drawn him up, reaching inside for the soothing magic he'd found for himself after too long an acquaintance with the whip, giving everything he had to a girl half his age, watching the blisters and cracks and pain disappear from her face...

He collapsed, too exhausted to register the new panic from the girl he'd healed, and her mother, and half the bucket brigade who had seen him for what he was, and the man with the Sword of Mercy on his breast who hadn't needed to see it to know…

As the Templar took him, scant steps away from the cellar he'd just fled, the woman in the window turned away and the man stepped forward to join in passing buckets toward the flames.


No matter who had held the lash, he had never cried for the pain. He recalls that once, at the end of his fifth summer, his mother had gathered her lost little boy to her skirts and held him while his father tied down the cart to make their escape, all for the benefit of those who looked on from a busy trade depot aside a well-traveled road and none for the comfort of the boy who'd lost his name when he became a burden to be borne.

He also understands that some changes can never come quietly.