A/N: This was written as part of the Dragon Age Fanfic Christmas exchange for SteveGarbage, who is much, much, much better at writing compelling tragedy than I am. Nevertheless, I hope he and you enjoy this little origin tale of Flemeth, the Witch of the Wilds, and her power. And then go read his things, which are wonderfully tragic and dark and complicated. You won't be disappointed!

It began in blood, as all things do.

Flemeth of Highever singing in a tower prison, a stone between her fingers. She'd sharpened it during patient weeks, scraping over walls in lonely, mournful sounds. There was no one to watch her work. The guards no longer lingered at her door when they brought her meals, watching her eat with leers that ate at the meager peace she'd found. Her beauty was gone, fleeing as swiftly as life across the Veil. Beauty had no home in this place.

"Twilight darkens, nightingale sings

A prayer across the hill.

The world is full of marvelous things

To break against my will."

She sang the familiar song as she worked stone against stone. The Chasind had taught it to her in their hidden places, shaded from the moon that watched and judged. A noble girl of the Alamarri had no business in their rituals, or so she'd been taught, but her magic had always taken her to places where she had no business in. And now their songs would bring her the vengeance she needed.

Flemeth of the Wilds kneeling on a cold floor, unshed tears stinging her eyes. She'd never cried for Osen, and she wondered if he was disappointed in her lack. He'd been a fervent disciple of the emotional wellsprings of life. When he'd sat at her feet, spinning words out of the air like dreams, he'd been the light itself. His hair was the pale blond of straw in the sun, his eyes a golden glow, and he made a striking contrast to her own dark countenance. The first time they'd come together, a stolen afternoon that had never been returned, he'd compared her to the uncertain perfection of midnight. Neither one day nor the other. Flemeth was the hinge on which his world changed.

It had been Osen who insisted they return to Highever to repent and make amends. He desired a final kindness to her husband, Conobar, the man they'd wronged so cruelly. He was dying, said Osen. Their life would be ever-cursed if they denied his wish. The Chasind had taught him that in their open places, under the sun that followed and blessed.

"A cloak of black, the sharpest steel

The flint against the stones.

We lay ourselves across the wheel

To break each others' bones."

The time was almost right. The sun slid ever lower, and there was no moon to see what was to become. This was the night of gathering power, a time of weakness between the worlds. Flemeth had folded her strength to her tightly as the days passed, barely sleeping as she sank deeply into the magic that thrummed bright and pure. This was not a spell to be done lightly, and it would only work once.

Flemeth the Damned slicing careful little lines across her palms, leaving the skin marked but unbroken. Each repetition of the runes was another cycle in the spell. As the moon waned and waxed, as the sun rose and fell, so did her spirit spiral in and out, circling closer to that next world.

The thumbnail of the sun disappeared from sight, and it was time.

"Blood red and hot, the river flows

A channel running through.

I call for aid against my foes

To break the world in two."

She sliced her palms precisely, a circle and a cross, and the pain was somehow deeper than anything she'd ever known. Her soul fled through the path she'd created, tearing at her flesh in a desperate bid to remain, but she forced it out. The song, and the blood, and the sky with no moon. A soul, freely given, and magic, jealously kept. These were the ingredients for the spell, and she would not let herself be so selfish as to remain alive in its working.

When she at last prised away the last grasping fingers of her spirit, a mind touched her. Or something of the sort. It was less a mind than a presence, but it was curious. It was distinctly curious. And above all, it was powerful.

I thought these paths closed, quickling. What is it that you seek?

"Vengeance," said Flemeth, voice steady for all its pain. "My husband killed my lover and imprisoned me. He tricked us into sympathy that we should have never shown. I demand his death."

A rich chuckle floated through the tunnel, delight plain inside of it. I can give you this, gladly. A treacherous husband is a pleasure to hunt. But you may not like the price it brings.

"I'm not afraid to die."

Death is no price when one hardly exists before flickering into darkness. Your price will be to live and see others die.

Flemeth smiled, a slashing sickle across her face that she saw through the eyes of the spirit. It was not beauty, not anymore, but it was pure and young and certain. "I will be pleased to watch their deaths."

A brave answer. And foolish. But very well. Let us seek your vengeance, Flemeth the Undying. Mythal, the mother of all, accepts your offering.

Conobar's castle learned true red that day, a splashing of crimson paint that ran freely through its halls. Flemeth's new claws ripped and tore through the guards, the courtesans, and even the servants. None who dwelt in that place were safe, and while they would later claim that she drank the blood of her victims for strength, that she laughed triumphantly at every last breath, and that she killed Conobar last as he wept and pleaded beneath her naked, monstrous form, the truth was that she hardly remembered their faces. Even her husband was dim to her, and when his blood was spattered across the throne that had once been hers, she was as surprised to see the dripping line across his throat as anyone.

Flemeth went back to the Wilds, and for a time she merely marked the days until death. Her purpose had been fulfilled, and the only step left was to wait for the spirit to burn away, to leave her body to the dust that it would become without power to sustain it. She had lived to watch them die. It was enough.

But Mythal had other plans, and in time Flemeth learned that she had not summoned a spirit but a god. A hungry god, and a god who was wroth indeed and had no intention of burning away. She restored Flemeth's lost beauty and set her to sing among the trees, to attract the men of the Chasind and grant her the immortality of motherhood. Those who could not serve were discarded, and Flemeth settled in to try again after each was buried in the darkest copse she could find.

On another moonless night, the chief of a distant tribe found her, laughing and ebony, and he served very well indeed. When the man ran afterward, afraid of the joyful fire burning in her eyes, Flemeth asked, "Why did you not kill him?"

Does one attach a message to a bird, then shoot it out of the air as soon as it takes wing? He will be useful in spreading our legend. The voice softened, just slightly. Besides, he sparked life inside of us, and that is an inauspicious time for killing.

Flemeth reached down to touch her stomach, bare and flat beneath the moon. It seemed no different than before. "How can you be sure?"

A mother always knows.

And so it went for months. Flemeth became known as the mad witch, the woman gliding through trees and speaking to herself while her belly grew into a new thing. A vessel. Mythal taught her the secret of eternal life, which was less a secret and more a trick, as all true magic was. To live, one only needed another to die in her place. To live forever, one only needed the death to be so close to her own as to be indistinguishable.

When the babe was almost due, Flemeth traveled to a lonely cave at Mythal's direction and settled in to wait for the pain. Ancient writing covered the walls, Elvhen by the look, and Mythal took delight in telling her all that it said and erasing the knowledge the next minute. Flemeth read the lines a dozen times, a hundred, but her mind remained stubbornly blank when she tried to hold them permanently.

Once the birth began, it was over sooner than she would have believed possible. There was only the space of a breath between agony and freedom, and she hummed a sweet tune to the bloody child in her hands as she severed the physical link between them and began to weave the magical. It was a girl, Alaria, and Mythal whispered, You will bear many daughters, and they are all you will bear.

Flemeth shivered when Alaria cried out as though she'd heard. She shushed her irritably, regretting the dark hair and the eyes of the night, with no hint of Osen's pure light inside of her. The child was a sick parody of the future he'd dreamed for them so many times in verse and music. He would never have approved of so much blood, but Flemeth slid a thumb across the infant's forehead, marking her, before cleansing her with the water she'd gathered before the labor began.

And they will rise and call her blessed.

Mythal was pleased with their child. Alaria was silent as a youth, obedient and grave, and she never ran too fast or ranged too far. A more docile child the Chasind had never seen, and when they met with tribes, to trade news or goods, the elders stared at her in fear. They all knew the tales of the mad witch, and the Chasind's familiarity with the theory of demons didn't make them any less afraid of their reality. They whispered behind their hands, took their boys inside their huts and turned their girls' faces to the ground. A demon-touched child was a curse upon them all.

But try as they might, the Chasind mages never found a demon inside of either of them, and so they were tolerated, in their own way. And Flemeth was useful to them, as the tale of Conobar mingled with the rest and made the Almarri frightful of rousing those who lived in the woods.

Flemeth had resolved to never think of the child with affection, or even curiosity, as a bulwark against their future, but one day as they walked away from a tribe's gathering she asked, "Does it not bother you, child, when they spit and cross their fingers behind their backs? Very few could accept such treatment with equanimity."

Alaria blinked up into the sun, coal-dark eyes vanishing behind pale lids. "No, Mother. The whispering of fools is nothing to the ancient trees."

Flemeth laughed, fierce and joyful, because despite everything, that confidence was her own. A gift, given to her daughter, that could never be denied. "You see," she said to Mythal later that night. "She is not all yours. She is mine, too. And that will be enough to stop this."

She has always been yours, said Mythal. But destinies cannot be changed so easily. You will watch her, know her, understand her, and still she will do as she must. Creation is not control. The mother's curse.

"You're wrong," said Flemeth. "My will is iron. My daughter will never know you."

Mythal laughed in her mind, a beautifully silver sound that shivered like wind in the grass. You sound like a man I once knew. He, too, had will of iron, and more passion than was good for him. Fen'Harel thought the future easy to shape. He had no understanding of what he was creating. But I wish you luck, Flemeth of the Chasind. Perhaps the world is different, for the quick. The elves do not know everything.

The goddess receded, became unobtrusive, and after that night, no matter how Flemeth spoke, the voice never came back.

She took Alaria back to the Chasind, and they slowly built a home for themselves in their huts. Alaria lost some of her solemnity and Flemeth her reserve, and they were almost part of the world. If Flemeth aged slowly or retained her beauty too long, the rest put it down to the strength of her magic.

Alaria's magic was also strong, not hot and vibrant like Flemeth's but cool and powerful. It suited her personality, and the Chasind wise women taught her well in the trees. Flemeth taught her better in the hut, and as Alaria flowered she was sought after by kings and warrior chiefs throughout the land for both power and beauty. She spurned them, one and all, despite Flemeth's hope she would catch fire and run, the way the she'd run from Conobar.

But that inclination wasn't the gift that Alaria had been given, and when Flemeth mentioned the idea to her, the girl only smiled. "They can offer me nothing that I do not posses myself," she said, braiding her hair into long plaits beside their fire. "Why run from where I'm meant to be?"

"Perhaps the intuitions that guide you are false," said Flemeth. "Perhaps there is a danger that is not so easily scented. Our magic does not make us invulnerable, daughter."

"No," said Alaria thoughtfully. "I will not live forever, 'tis true. I have always known that. But if I live as I am meant, it will feel as though I do." She bounded up lightly, kissed her mother, and went back into the woods of her conception, humming a familiar, bloody tune all the while. Flemeth watched her go with fear, and she felt Mythal laughing, though she heard nothing at all.

When Alaria reached her 30th birthday, she asked her mother to gift her a journey, which Flemeth acceded to gladly. Her daughter had grown sharper, like a stone against the walls, in the last year, and a change of scenery might be the thing to bring her back to her softer self. But as Alaria led them down half-familiar paths in the woods, seemingly at random but always circling towards a central point, Flemeth asked her to stop. To go back to their home.

"This is my gift," said Alaria in her newly hard voice, and Flemeth could say nothing against it.

By the time they reached the cave of Elvhen writings, Flemeth was no longer surprised at their destination. Alaria walked unerringly to the place where she'd been born, standing over the blood that was gone in the physical world but all too obvious in the realm of magic. Her daughter raised a hand, sparking with lightning, and looked at Flemeth with a proud, triumphant grin. "This is where it will be," she said.

"What will be, my daughter?" asked Flemeth. She looked to the mouth of the cave, but before the thought could finishing forming a barrier sprang across it, the same color as Alaria's magic.

"The fulfillment of my purpose," said Alaria. "The wise women taught me to read the branches and the leaves, to send my magic across the world to find it, and this is it. The world promised me I would find peace."

"Were you not peaceful before?"

The girl shook her head. "I was happy by choice. I could hide the wrongness of my life, but that isn't peaceful. Show me the magic you've been hiding from me, Mother."

They argued for a time, but it was a lost battle from the first word. The confidence of Alaria was greater than Flemeth's by definition, because it had come from her, and had diminished her own in the giving. At long last Mythal rose to the forefront, working the magic of the ancient elves, and the cave filled with light and thunder as mother and daughter made the cuts that would form a conduit between them. A howling laughter filled the air when their souls slid past one another, when the blood mingled and sang the same song, harmony to unison to harmony again.

When it was over, Flemeth blinked from a new body, but one she knew almost as well as her own. A scar on the knee from a careless fall, a mark on the back from a wayward ember of fire, hair that curled into its ends not matter how long a mother ran her brush through it. The energy was so familiar but younger and vital, and Flemeth felt almost drunk on the expanded power suddenly surrounding her again.

Alaria, in Flemeth's old, hard-used body, blinked slowly. "So what now, for me?"

The circle will close, said Mythal, and she raised Flemeth's hands, Alaria's fingers, and fire raced across the cave to envelop the other. The screams were long and anguished, and tears rolled down Flemeth's face, though she couldn't look away. Burning was a long death, and a hard one, and by the time it was done Flemeth was as dry as the ground after a month without rain.

It was done in minutes or years, depending on the reckoning, and Mythal stepped past the smoking ash and wiped her hands delicately. "And now it is done."

Flemeth wept in her prison, deep below the surface of the body, but Alaria's voice was there as well, faint but smiling. I've run away at last, Mother.

Cressia received Flemeth's joy, a bubbling laughter that was freedom and wonder. She was impossible not to love, and Flemeth returned to chase the slight, wispy figure through wildflower fields underneath streaming sky. She had the ruddy coloring of her father, a traveling merchant who'd strayed into the wrong woods.

Her spirit was broken on the rocks below a glassy cliff, and the water running over the body echoed the laughter of the body that still lived.

Janis took her will to fight, and Flemeth watched her trap her foes in cages of pure magic, merciless and thorough but never cruel. She responded to the injustice of the world with her might and her staff and her wildness, a legacy of the Grey Warden who'd sired her, unknowing. The immoral world learned to fear her, and the Chasind were never quite the same after she arrived.

The staff she wielded cracked beneath the earth that swallowed her, and the jeweled crystal of it remained as a marker of the place where her soul died.

Lilith was sweet seduction, the fluttering eyes that Conobar craved and Osen worshiped. Through her Flemeth remembered what it was to feel power, to know the people around her were always watching and marking what was. Flemeth and her daughter resided in the world once more, showered by jewels and favors and land, and Lilith sang with the lovely voice of a bard, the man who'd escaped the hangman's noose and chose an inviting cave for shelter.

The song spilled from her blood in the glade where the circle came due, and the legends said that on moonless nights, a man could hear the gentle call of her shadow across the Veil. Mythal approved of the tale.

There were dozens of daughters down the years, each taking a piece of Flemeth and refracting it, changing it into something that fit differently upon its return. Their voices lived housed inside the body, learning family by feel and sound. There were days when Flemeth never heard herself but through those voices, and she wondered if the day might come where her daughters were all that remained. It would not be a bad end, but when she asked Mythal if such a thing were possible, the goddess never answered.

Her daughters never remembered their own ends, and that was the only blessing in the curse of Flemeth's motherhood.

She was only a whisper in the wind by the time she'd become Eryn, a vibrant woman who'd taken Flemeth's loneliness and honed it to the edge of a blade. She'd succeeded as no one else had in retreating from the world, becoming pure myth, and when the time came to find a father she had no way to begin. The voices offered suggestions, Lilith with song and Yavana with traps and Anis with persuasion. But at last a quiet elf came into the woods on sure feet, wearing the vallaslin of Mythal. He spoke not a word, even when Eryn begged him for a name or clan. He stayed the night with her, the first who ever had, and his eyes were Osen's amber under the full moon's light.

He kissed Eryn on the head when he left, and though she slept soundly Flemeth was awake within. Mythal came to the fore, solemn and regal in her bearing. The time of waiting is over, she said. The world is ready to change.

So when a child came nine months later, in that same Elvhen cave, and her eyes were the shining orange of her long-ago lover, Flemeth rose like the dawn into the body that had always been hers to take. The voices of her daughters combined into a single whole, and all were amazed at the child in her arms. This was the dream, promised so long ago, and here was a true daughter to love. The world was ready to change, and she would finally have what she wanted. A child she would never possess, but one she would live alongside until death.

When Morrigan turned out to have her rebellion, her stubborn need to walk the path where no signs pointed and no other feet had trod, Flemeth had to laugh at the nature of destiny, which by now she understood all too well.

"I wish to learn of the elves, Mother," said Morrigan. "The humans know little, but the elves have magic the likes of which I cannot find on my own. They will accept me."

"No, little Morrigan," said Flemeth, looking down at the dark-topped head of the child stamping in front of her. "The world is not for us to impress ourselves upon like footprints on the grass. We must remain here, away from the elves. And the humans."

"How will I learn anything if I can find no teachers?"

Flemeth smiled wryly. "A mother is not enough of a teacher?"

"What can a woman who shuns any type of proper knowledge teach me?" asked Morrigan, her small, half-moon face bright and angry.

"You might be surprised," said Flemeth. Mythal whispered to her, a surprising offer, but Flemeth grasped at it eagerly. Anything for this daughter, to keep her close. This daughter who would be her last. "I will take you to a place where the elves are no longer, but their echoes will teach you what you desire."

So this time, when Mythal taught her the meaning of the words on the walls of the cave, Flemeth remembered them all. She and Morrigan learned to twist their shapes, to absorb the whole of another creature and become a new life. Morrigan laughed in delight the first time she became a fox, as quick and clever as she was, and she declared upon changing back that she had never felt more herself. She hugged her mother with an earnest gratitude that Flemeth would carry in her heart for the rest of her days.

Flemeth taught herself, as well, and back in their hidden hut she took to all manner of birds, soaring creatures with wings that carried her above the world. She half-hoped to find the Veil, a place to cross without blood, and though Mythal found the hopes amusing she never stopped trying. Morrigan preferred secrecy and brains in her learning, and she shifted to cats, to wolves, to all the things that hid and ran in the shadows.

It was Morrigan's delight to point out that the animals of her self were ones which preyed upon Flemeth's nature, and the observation which began gently changed to something angry and bitter as she aged. "A lynx would never be contained by a sparrow," she said one evening after they'd run together. "A wolf has no need of a songbird."

"Need has little to do with the world," said Flemeth. "The rustling of the birds alerts the wolf to danger it has not yet sensed. Their flights tell the world what changes may come." She smiled, a glittering bitterness borne of destiny. For the King had come to Ostagar, and the shape of the future was taking its bloody shape.

"Besides," Flemeth added, "an owl will kill a fox with nary a qualm."

"Only if it can catch her," said Morrigan. She stalked into the woods, and Flemeth knew she would change into a thing that could observe the camped soldiers with hidden fascination, and she was powerless to stop it.

Flemeth was old at last, hair white and face lined, and she had lived to see so many die.

The future came onward, inexorable as the tide. Grey Wardens stumbled into their lives, and she released Morrigan to their care - the eagerness in her departure was a secret for her mother alone - and Flemeth left the little hut for what would come next. Better to be traveling, to hide away from the sweet memories of Morrigan humming by the fire, of all of the places she'd brought a kill or curled up against her bed in the shape of something new that only she understood. The hardest memory was the cradle that had held sweet hope for a time, but hope was nothing to a woman who couldn't die. She left it all and carefully placed the pieces of the future that would lead to her end.

A trifle to replace the grimoire in the Circle with a tome of only half-truths instead of outright lies. The work of little to drive the darkspawn away from her home, to create a safe path back to her hut where Morrigan would find her again. Harder, and more painful, were the months of learning to be that thing of claws and wings once more, to understand a dragon and find its fire inside of her without fail. Mythal was a help there, her feral nature providing the drive that Flemeth lacked. The goddess's changes were close at hand, and Flemeth found herself humming bloody spells whenever she woke from her dreams.

But this time the blood would be hers. Morrigan would kill her, a mighty battle that would free them both, and Mythal would never have this daughter or the change she craved.

Flemeth was sure she'd hidden her intentions well. Centuries were sufficient to learn another's mind intimately, and Mythal's weakness had always been her surety in her own glamour. But glamour could never survive such close quarters, and Flemeth understood the grasping, clawing nature of the spirit as deeply as she understood herself.

The Wardens returned, Flemeth just ahead of their arrival, and the grey-eyed human challenged her to release Morrigan with an indignation that spoke of a deep love for her daughter. Flemeth rejoiced to see it, but she acknowledged it not at all.

"My daughter would not ask this of me herself? I suppose that is of a keeping with her character. A weak girl, always, looking for the shadows instead of the light and using others to fight her battles."

As the Warden growled new threats, incensed and affronted, Flemeth hid her smile and played her part. Mythal watched the blustering man in front of her with curiosity while Flemeth worked. She offered a barter that she knew would never be accepted by such a noble knight, then transformed into the monster she could now find in herself at a single breath. She fought hard, Mythal aiding her in strength and speed, but a man lit by love had never lost a fight to a dragon in all of time.

Mythal screamed and twisted in outrage when the Warden's sword struck deep into Flemeth's belly, but the witch of the Chasind, the lady of Highever, laughed in her dragon's voice, stretching for the Veil with her wings and sinking gratefully into the blackness.

She woke on a mountain, in a Dalish burial ground, and Mythal was in control. She spoke words that Flemeth barely heard to people she recognized not at all, but their answers indicated she was known to them. As Mythal spoke, she opened her mind to Flemeth and allowed her to see all of the things that she'd never known. The meeting with the Hawkes, the fight they'd waged, and the realization that Mythal had been a dragon long before Flemeth's pitiful attempts to learn the form.

The goddess had known, always, of what Flemeth had hoped to achieve with Morrigan, and the amulet she'd created to hold them as a safeguard was the final revelation. Mythal was melding with her now, in truth, teaching her all of the things that mere centuries would never be enough to learn. They were intertwined now, truly joined, and their immortality was nearly assured.

Mythal kept control until they were out of sight of any curious eyes, and then she released Flemeth's body, as a mother lets a child in her arms run through a glade as soon as a dangerous river is finally crossed.

Flemeth ran through the unfamiliar woods of the Marches, scoring her skin against bushes and trees that had no sympathy for a frightened woman and the passenger who could never be escaped. For when she stopped to take breath, Mythal spoke, and her will dominated the world.

Did you think yourself stronger than the elves, little human? You have never been. You have been mine from the first moment, and the things you have done while you slept so trustingly would shock your naive heart. But we have succeeded. The world will be reborn.

The goddess paused, a hint of terrible, chilling kindness entering her voice. But fear not - the pain of its birth will not be yours. A reward for all you have given, for you have given me everything. I charged your daughter to do my will, and Morrigan will bear the son you never could. She will be the first mother of the new Elvhen empire, her son will rule its creation, and we will find the glory we desire.

And as Flemeth fractured and wept in the forest, outmaneuvered and trapped, lost and damned, Mythal sang a quiet verse into the growing gloom using the mouth of her vessel.

"The sword blade gleams, burnished bright

The hammer strikes the nail.

My people rise in fearsome might

To break open the Veil."