Disclaimer: I own neither Claymore nor the Dragon Age series.
One Full Set
Summary: Helen and Deneve of the Seven Ghosts became the Inquisitors by sheer accident. But these days with their linked youki, they are more a single entity in different bodies than seven people distinct from each other. Where one goes, the rest follow.
Chapter 1: In Seven Pieces
1.
Having lived and battled together for a century or two, they knew each other like the back of their hands. Miria was the brains. Claire was the kid—a particularly stubborn one. Cynthia was the healer, Tabitha the mother, Yuma the defender. And then there were Helen and Deneve, the brash one and the overly cautious one. No cookies to correctly guessing who was who.
As it went though, the problem this time did not start with Helen. For all that Deneve berated her recklessness in battle and in life, Helen wasn't the one stupid enough to reach for that glowing, dubious looking ball from the equally dubious looking dude in the even more dubious looking robe (And stockings! With stripes! Helen saw!). Oh no sir, trouble this time did not start with Helen at all because at the time the ball went flying, Helen was actually holding up the poor old lady in the officious looking robe and pronged hat; and so her busy hands were kept from grabbing foreign object of questionable effect. The one with the free hands was Deneve, and seeing the glowing ball on a trajectory that would see it hitting Helen square in the head, the usually calmer warrior of the two, fucking martyr that she was, just had to go and grab the thing before it could land anywhere near her precious teammate.
And of course with their luck, it just didn't fucking end well for Deneve. Lots of lights and funky lightning with full zippy sound effects ensued. Helen didn't care much for the light show. She had seen worse during the Awakened Being war, but amidst the outrageous shrieks of the dude in the robe and his armored brethren, she could hear Deneve grunting in pain, and that was an alarming thing because usually it took an Abyssal One tearing her arm clean off for Deneve to start vocally complaining about her lot in life. And that funky ball with the trippy swirl and green light was making her grunt out loud? Alarm bells went off blaring in Helen's head the moment, and she did exactly what her status as the brash one in the group gave her license to.
Helen pushed the old lady from her unceremoniously, launched herself forward and attempted to yank the ball from Deneve's hand.
And that was how trouble started.
2.
The searing pain had two causes, Deneve detected immediately. One, because the ball was burning a foreign youki into her (and Helen's) hands. Two, because her youki and the youki of her six sisters in arms was swirling about in their mental links, churned and agitated and pulled out of balance. There was a sort of yanking motion going on as the two forces dueled, the ball trying to force something foreign into her and Helen's bodies while the youki of the five Ghosts absent from this place rallied to their sister's distressed cry and attempted to to keep the tainted youki out.
She could tell there was enormous power housed within the foreign artifact, could sense the untold eons of its age. It levied a crushing pressure on her and were she and Helen like the mortal races that dotted these lands, most likely they would have crumbled to dust. But mortal races they weren't, and the combined might of all seven Calamity War veterans was a force no less powerful than this foreign artifact.
There was maybe a minute of impasse between the unresisting force of the ball and the immovable wall of their combined youki before the implosion occurred. Dimly, Deneve sensed the ball's tainted youki being split into seven equal proportions, and through the link they maintained, seeped into the mind and body of her and her sisters. Then she blacked out.
3.
When Helen came to, the world was wrong and tainted and smelt nauseous, like the stench of a bloated Awakened One except… not. It was a vile place that defied explanation and comprehension so Helen did what her instincts told her to. She grabbed both Deneve and the old lady in the pronged hat and proceeded to bodily haul the both of them to the one place that smelt the least offensive in this warped world.
They were assaulted on the way with strange, shrieking creatures that shifted shapes—from the bugs that Helen hated to the vague silhouette of the Destroyer Parasites that plagued Deneve's dreams for days after encounter. Despite their grotesque appearances, they weren't particularly strong. Their forms and limited attacks lent themselves to far too many maneuvers. Had they been in a good shape, it wouldn't taken either of them more than a minute to clear the entire horde of them from this plain. But as it was, the tainted youki was wrecking havoc to their systems. Deneve—having borne seconds more of the ball's assault—was still out of it, so it was down to Helen to get all three of them through the cragged hill in the horizon and to the glowing slit that looked like a one way ticket out of this place.
Helen swung her claymore wildly with one hand while holding Deneve and the lady with her other hand and fought her way to the gateway, step by step. Things went belly up when she got to precious few steps away from the gateway. More of the things were coming and Deneve was not waking up and she was actually panicking a little. The lady stepped away from her hold then. Swivelling around, she pushed the weakened Helen with Deneve in her arms through the portal, yelling at them.
"Run!"
Then the screeching creatures closed around her and exhaustion took Helen. She just about registered the burned down ruins and fossilized skeletons around her before everything went dark.
4.
They woke at nearly the same time, with Deneve's mind tugging Helen's along with it, the both of them ascending to full consciousness. They were in separate cells apart from each other, but they had lived and breathed together for too long for mere walls to separate their minds from each other. Knowing the other was well (and so were the other five from the faint echos of their mental links) was a great relief. They could feel and see the taint of the ball in their bodies, in their hands, Deneve on her left and Helen on her right, but it was faint, subdued by their own youki.
It took a while more for two women of the local races, humans like the ones on their home island, to come in and attempt to interrogate them separately. They put up an admirable performance, but their audiences just happened to be hardened warriors who had gone through hell and back, and so their interrogators got nothing other than what Helen and Deneve wanted them to know.
One, they were Dalish elves of a particularly reclusive clan. It hadn't taken long for them from the moment they landed on this continent to learn which ethnic group was the safest cover for their true identity. Their appearance was a little too… distinct for pure humans, what with their hair and eyes and physical abilities. They were too tall to be dwarves and didn't have the horns of the Qunari. In terms of physical resemblance, their best bet was the elves. They had a similarly otherworldly look about them, and some of them already had the pointed ears. It was simply a matter of glued on tiny prosthetics and some face paints for the locals to automatically assume they were dealing with a band of elves rather than alien women from oversea. In terms of social construct, it was even better. The Dalish elves were a reclusive people and depending on the clans, can have vastly different customs and attitudes towards outsiders. Any mistakes they made can be easily construed up to the fact that they simply had a different way to go about things.
Two, they were warrior scouts of the clan, sent to check out a particularly interesting human event. Nothing entirely too suspicious about that.
Three, they had no idea what went down in that temple of the humans either.
Frustrated that they couldn't anything else out of the two, the humans, whose names were Cassandra and Lelianna apparently, changed their approach. They took the two of them out of the cell, freed their hands from the cuffs (not that they needed to be freed really. That metal looked brittled and rusted as hell! Helen was afraid to sneeze while having it on even), and took them out of the building to see 'what had happened'.
While they were out cold, it appeared the skies had split a big hole in it. That was… Helen could already feel the reproachful look Miria was bound to give her, regardless of the fact that Helen didn't do shit wrong this time around! Their orders had been to keep a low profile and not to engage in drawn out affairs with the locals. Well, as far as she saw, Helen could already see a high-profile (of the infamous kind) and drawn out affair in the future with these angry believers of the local religion.
It would have been easy to bolt the heck out of that place right there and then, but a furious conversation through eye contact between the two of them stalled their escape. It would be a cinch to outrun any of the warriors here, even if they didn't have their claymores with them, but the tainted youki still squirmed in their hands and they didn't know zip about it. From the echos of their mental link, it seemed the other five had also been afflicted with the same thing. The only way for them to learn more about… whatever this thing was… would be to stay with these locals.
So they fell in line behind the female human warrior Cassandra and turned a deaf ears to her incessant complaints and accusations of their supposed part in this disaster. Ten minutes after, a bridge collapsed beneath their feet. Cassandra was suddenly the only armed one facing off against a slew of the local demons. For but the briefest second Helen debated letting the human warrior do her things while she stood around watching… not like any of these things could hurt her if they tried… but then one of the thing decided to zap her with a sparkling bolt thingy and Helen just had to retaliate… by spearing it with a puny human sword right through its mother-licking head. It died in the blink of an eye, but the damage was done. Helen's hair, still short but meticulously kept, was a fluff of frizz courtesy of the static in that thing's bolt. She was pissed and the thing had died way too quickly and too easily for her to cool off. So, with multiple puny human swords in one hand, Helen started mowing down all the monsters in ice plains by spearing them all in the head while screaming "Go lick a yoma, you mother-licking bugs!" at the monsters.
The moment the ice plain was clear, Cassandra was in her face, demanding her to put down the sword. Deneve was right beside her then, with a sword of her own in hand, and in a placating voice attempted to reason with Cassandra.
"You're going to have to trust us, human. You won't be able to get through their horde alone."
Cassandra fumed for maybe a second but Deneve had stared down way too many Awakened Beings for a human to even make an impression on her.
5.
The apostate elf set the both of them on alert the moment he made his presence known. For one, he was an elf and therefore had a better chance than most at blowing their cover while on this continent. Second, he was a mage and apparently knowledgeable on all things concerning the Fade, one of which was the mark on their hands.
'Should we kidnap the guy and make a run for it?' Helen communicated across a glance of her eyes.
'Not yet. He sounds like he might know what's going on with us, but fixing this thing may require resources neither we nor he have. The human group sound like they need our help. Staying with them for now will give us the better chance of fixing whatever has gone wrong with our sisters. Let's stay for now,' said Deneve in a minute twitch of her eyebrow, the one facing away from Helen.
The dwarf was a possible leak if they stayed on too long though, and so at the back of her head Deneve started filing away contingency plans in case they needed to silence him permanently… or something.
"So you're Solas!" said Helen, smiling broadly at the elf mage while holding out her hands as if inviting him in for a hug between kinsmen. "Fancy seeing you here. I reckon we're going to have a long and mutually beneficial relationship ahead of us."
"... me thinks you better watch your back, Chuckles. This one has teeth, I can tell," said the dwarf. Automatically, Deneve upped his risk factor.
6.
The stinking prissy human male didn't like them. Well, tough licking luck. The temple where all their troubles started was now a glassed ruin, that was… a little more worrying. Learning that their marks were connected to the rifts in the skies and likely would not go away until they were all closed up? That took the cake in in terms of fucked up problems of the week.
One energetic bout of puny sword throwing from Helen and strongarming from Deneve later, they were down one dead Pride Demon. Then they raised their hands in unison at the tear in the skies and together attempted to pull it close. It went dark a third time.
When they woke up, the humans had done a complete one eighty in attitude. With cries and whispers of 'Blessed Duo! Did you see the twin heralds of Andraste?' behind their back, they made their way to the big, important looking building at the back of the village. There, they found the prissy old priest throwing a fit and Cassandra and Leliana not putting up with him. Some words thrown back and forth later, the two of them were suddenly at the center of attention of what appeared to be the four most influential humans of the area, Cassandra the Seeker, Cullen the General, Leliana the Spymaster and Josephine the Diplomat.
"Will you help us?" asked Cassandra, her eyes beseeching them with an honesty and vulnerability that made them feel at once old and guilty. These mortals, they were young and fragile. Everything until now had only been sort of nuisances to Helen and Deneve, but to these people, it was the end of the world. Honor had never been a founding principle of the Warrior Code, but each and every Warrior hoped to die with a human heart. They could not in good conscience turn away from these people, especially when their fates now seemed entwined through these bedamned marks.
'Miria is going to be pissed,' said Helen via the tiniest squinting of her right eye.
'No way around it. Forward is the only direction. We'll figure something out later. Maybe fake our own deaths after we beat the local big demons to a pulp and everyone is too busy celebrating to pay us any mind?', replied Deneve, blinking both eyes at once as if she was shocked into silence by the attention of the four important humans.
"If that's what it takes, then you have our swords," said both of them in tandem.
And that was how Helen and Deneve of the Seven Ghost became the Inquisitors of the new Inquisition.
End Chapter 1
1/ This fic is supposed to be a fun romp into the premise of 'The Seven Ghosts become the Inquisitors and attempt to hide their strength by trying not to kill demons and red templars too quickly and easily'.
…
..
…
.. Okay. I kid. I kid. I just want to screw up the Dragon Age universe by throwing uber powerful half-human Claymores at it is all. Honest to God!
2/ Most likely no romance in this fic, only a lot of badass Claymore warriors and their slightly creepy Awakened Forms.
3/ In terms of timeline, it's post ending for Claymore (around one century after the ending), and right at the beginning of the game.
4/ The rest of the Seven Ghosts (and yes, Tabitha is alive. I'll explain that later) will arrive in the next chapter. We will also have the POVs of other people like Cassandra, Leliana, and Varric concerning the Claymores (weirdest band of elves they have ever seen yet).