"There is a secret you need to know, one you will not expect," she had began abruptly as he walked into her room for the night. He was expecting one of their frequent trysts, instead he walked into a suffocating revelation.
From the moment Fenris met Deliahn Hawke he knew she was trouble. Alluring and cunning, she was a master of poisons and a rogue to be envied of. For about nine years he had watched her crush her enemies and plot circles around the greatest political masterminds he had known. When he met her, her hair had been long. Now it was streaming without the braids she wore in combat. If he liked anything about her besides her extremely attractive features and mischievous cunning, it was her beliefs.
She epitomized things he never even knew he thought.
"Mages are fools," she said blankly to him during one of their first meetings. "If you sell your soul for anything, you are a fool. But for freedom? You are worse than I could explain," she said bluntly as she ran a dagger through the neck of an apostate. She struck without compassion. She killed anyone who sympathized with demons.
Yet she also stayed her hand. She would look at him with a hesitation and then stay her blade, and when he asked her why?
"Mages are fools, but so are templars," she said simply. She looked to the mage before her, who only wanted freedom. Who was not an apostate. . . not yet.
"Fall to the demons and I will kill you. Remember these words, if you are so weak you cannot find freedom with your own magic you deserve the soulless hell that awaits you," she was icey to them. It incited empathy from him.
To say she understood him was an understatement. The one with the power in their relationship was almost undeniably her. He swore she thrived off of power in every instance- but her own power. She refused to borrow power from anyone. If there was a battle to be won she would win it. If there was a throat to slit she would cut it. If there was a lover to please, she would please them.
Hair as black as night, longer than her waist. Eyes like coals. Looking at her each and every time he knew he loved her deeply, and he also trusted her. She had protected him from his previous master, treated him like an equal, and showed compassion where it was not necessary as a woman as powerful as she.
"What is it?" Fenris hesitantly inquired. Timid he was not, but it was vastly unlike Deliahn to state something so brash and be incorrect. She walked towards him.
"I trust most of you- sincerely, I mean that- but I could not tell you. Some of you. . . I despise. The mage Merill sickens me with her dawdling in blood magic, you know that. I watch her hesitantly from afar. Anders is an abomination one step away from something deeply twisted. . . and yet I accept such things," she began as she traced the contours of his chest. He grabbed her wrist.
"You know I don't like to be teased," he said smugly. She gave a passive smile and withdrew her hand.
"My sister loves and fears me. Have you ever wondered why? Have you ever wondered why I feel both sympathy and angers towards mages?" she sat on her bed. For once in his life he was above her. She was. . . putting herself at his mercy?
"It seemed to me it was just that- your sister," he responded coolly. Deliahn smiled wistfully at him.
"My brother Carver died so long ago, you know. Bethany had rushed out before he did- and I stopped her with my blade. Were I anything but who I am I would have lost a different sibling. There is a crucial piece to the puzzle I have shared with no one, and I shall share it with you," Dehlian opened her hands in front of him, her palms pressed side by side in an open gesture. Then suddenly where there had been nothing, there was life. Conjured up from her very own hands was a flame, simple, but burning all the same.
"You-" Fenris said with an abstract shock in his throat. The flame suddenly became covered in crystals of ice. He had never seen a mage do such a thing before, put out their fire by the complex nature of coupling fire with ice.
"I am a mage," she said simply as she crushed her hands together, water falling from the cracks in her palms. He backed up.
"But, . . .all these years, every moment. . . every- You lied to me! Has every single word been a lie from your disgusting lips?" Fenris was angry, but his words did nothing to Dehlian. A woman, yes. But not one who cared what other's thought of her. Even Fenris. Even her beloved. She stood from the bed and walked towards him.
"Disgusting?" she purred with subdued seduction in her voice. "Don't lie from your anger, dear Fenris. A secret does not erase years of love and understanding," she stated simply. He growled.
"Not if that secret proves you to be a hypocrite!" he declared. She parted her lips in an amused smile.
"Tell me, my dear. . . of the abomination I am! Of the blood magic I partake upon, of the dark and deadly rituals in which I participate. You cannot, there are no such things. I crave power above all else. . . the deep power hidden inside of me. My dreams, my efforts, they would mean nothing if I was a mage who traded her soul for a power that was not hers," he had never heard her speak in such a way. He was angry, disgusted, and aroused all at once.
"I don't want anyone to look at a disgusting sludge of a demon and decide to worship them. I want people to see my face and know I am not to be trifled with," she was holding her dagger now, holding it in the palm of her hands. "If I am a mage they will think so, but for the wrong reasons. Not because I could kill them in an instant with my own might- but that I might whisper to the darkness!" She turned around.
"When I ran from the Blight, they called to me. All of them, every demon. I will make you rich, I will make you strong- and I laughed in their faces. Every one I told the same thing, 'You will make yourself those things, you will give me an empty glass and call it filled.' The demons know now. I will not give in. I have no desire to die at the feet of a templar with a decrepid figure and no soul to speak of. No- I wish to be powerful and beautiful- and one day when I am old and filled with nothing but stories, I will be at peace knowing that I became what I wished. And Dear Fenris, I hope you will be there beside me, to tell stories of the days when I was such. No demon can give me that, truly. I have no wish for some disgusting illusion,"
Fenris listened to her speech, her rant even, and felt conflicted. She had been saying this for years. She would be rich and powerful one day, and she would go on grand adventures and have interesting tales, and one day she would sit in her well off home and recall the days at which such things were important. And lately, she had said they would be together doing it.
"Why then? Why hide?" She laughed.
"Why? Because I would be tugged and torn at between fools like Anders and fools like Merill. Idiots. Buffoons! More than anything they are simpletons with no hopes or dreams beyond 'freedom'. Freedom is as simple as respect. No one has known my secret, yet have I truly changed, beloved? Have I shifted into an evil user of magic? Or am I still a fierce warrior? Am I not still a woman with the same dreams?" in front of him she lowered her delicate dress, a dress he now couldn't help but feel looked like magewear, and her dressings and trappings until she was nude. She traced his body once again.
"They are worms, those who abuse these powers. So I have hidden them away- in hopes that one day I will find people who understand the concept of control. And maybe on that day the wretched templars will be bright enough to know that rats in cages are miserable things, who cling to the hope of freedom!"
Who was this woman? Why was she so delicately built and so powerful all the same? A rogue in more than name, a keeper of secrets and traps. She had crushed other mages without a thought, and spared others. She had recruited people she despised solely to watch them. He was hungry for her. The same woman she had always been- the same woman who tore him apart. How fitting she would be a mage.
"I can't forgive you yet," he said deeply as he grabbed the soft flesh of her hips. He pulled her to him. She had just handed him the one thing he needed to completely understand her. . .as well as to truly be her equal. He now had power over her as well. He felt disgust in his stomach, but it could not stave off the love and lust he had felt for nearly a decade.
She had already won his heart.
"You'll have to move past it," she purred as she pressed her exceedingly warm body against him. Damn the clothes. He shoved her on the bed and for the first time he looked down to see someone with secrets. Someone vulnerable. Anger and lust mixed together, he took her without shedding any of his clothes.
"You're so impatient," she gasped against him. Mage or not, she still felt sweet and warm when he was inside of her. She kept speaking down to him, and he said nothing. Eventually she was crying out, begging, and pleading- her pale skin pressed against his and her body welcoming him. She seemed so vulnerable and petite- the opposite of her normal self. The sight of her genuinely submissive to him was too much to bare, and he filled her with himself. Panting and sweaty, she smiled her smug smile at him.
"You anticipated this, didn't you?" he snarked at her. She grinned.
"It was one or two of my ideas," she admitted casually. "Though, you broke my 'not inside of me' rule," she murmured in annoyance.
"My dear sweet Dehlian, I am suddenly under the impression you always wanted me to," he held her close to him.
"Now you get it, this really was a good decision,"
And there, somewhere in the midst of being held by a lying woman, in the midst of learning something truly desperately dark in her life, he felt more whole than he had felt in a while.