Author's notes: This one-shot glimpse of my Dragon Age character has been sitting in my desktop since last year. I was inspired to write it after I got to Skyhold in game for the first time. I decided on a lark to dust it off and publish it.
Inquisitor Elisheva Varatriel Lavellan.
She had to admit, the name had a certain ring of importance to it.
She'd been days away from her eighteenth birthday, from receiving her tribe's customary vallaslin at a ceremony in front of all her fellow elves, when, as the apprentice mage and the tribe's precocious First, Keeper Istimathoriel sent her to the Chantry Conclave.
What happened there, though, was history. What happened there, would change her destiny.
For sure, Elisheva, born in 9:23 Dragon, had been no ordinary Dalish elf child. Her father, Zevlaros, himself a talented mage, had known as much. He and his wife, Merrira, had tried desperately for a child, to no avail. Finally, late in 9:23, when Merrira was well past the usual childbearing age, she gave birth to a daughter. It had been seen by the clan as miraculous. Zevlaros chose the name Elisheva for his daughter, Elisheva, 'pledged to God.' It hadn't taken long for him to realize that his daughter's talents far outpaced his own.
Elisheva was certainly pledged. But to whom, exactly? To what god or goddess had this special child 'pledged' her life to?
Zev and Merrira knew that their only child was not long for the Dalish village where they had set up camp. No, they knew Elisheva had a much grander destiny. So, reluctantly, they entrusted her to the Keeper. She studied when she didn't have to study. She would wander off into the forests for days at a time, practicing magic. Even as a child, she seemed much older than her years.
She turned eighteen shortly after the conclave, while on the road fighting demons and closing fade rifts, who knows exactly when, even she'd forgotten the exact date. The days now seemed to blend into each other. And if she didn't know when it had happened, how would anyone else?
Being around other elves like Solas and Sera had made her question everything she was ever taught about her own elfhood. Solas wrapped himself in the history of the elves, and Sera seemed to hate everything about it. Where would she fall on the continuum?
In truth, she had been a proud Dalish, a proud representative of her species, of her kind. Or, at least she thought. She admitted to herself that she was intellectually energized by late-night arguments with Solas about Elven culture, and at the same time frustrated that she could never win. But there was something about him that she found incredibly off-putting. She couldn't quite put her finger on it.
Elisheva had been merely seventeen when she went to the conclave. Naive about the larger world, and indeed about everything except for magic, she'd mostly kept to herself and kept quiet.
It may have been how she survived.
Now, she was navigating a world with which she was not familiar - the world of human power and politics, forced to make choices that would not only affect the elves, but the entirety of Thedas. As an elf wandering the forests, she'd been largely insulated from these issues, save a few rumblings from the Keeper here and there. And now, a group of powerful, accomplished humans was looking to her to help them, to save them.
Who was she, anyway? Just a buck-toothed, knife-eared elf girl with a strange green mark on her hand?
The lone survivor of a mysterious blast at an important chantry gathering?
No, she was Inquisitor Elisheva Varatriel Lavellan.
Barely eighteen years old, she was a slender, slight slip of a girl, so small the wind might have blown her away, who was going around Thedas closing fade rifts and casting impressive lightning spells on demons. Her companions would look on with awe.
Her makeup-less face, large azure eyes, short caramel pixie, and pronounced overbite made her look even younger than she was. How could a girl so young and innocent looking possess this kind of power? Cassandra Pentaghast, the pious Chantry seeker and soldier who'd organized the Inquisition in the first place, thought it had to be the work of the goddess Andraste.
Yet, the Inquisition's caretakers knew, that with such a young girl and such power, also came such vulnerability and such malleability.
The power of that name hadn't sunk in yet when Inquisitor Lavellan and her assistants began moving into Skyhold, the impressive mountain fortress on the border of Ferelden and Orlais. I wish I could show my father this place, Elisheva thought to herself as the quartermaster brought in fine hand-picked wooden Dalish pieces for her bedchamber.
She had never seen a place like Skyhold in all of her life. Imposing and majestic, it was a far cry from anything she'd ever experienced. Now, it was home, for the forseeable future.
Elisheva Lavellan was barely eighteen years old, and she now had a castle and a throne, neither of which she felt she'd either earned or deserved.
"How are you feeling?" Dorian Pavus, the Tevinter mage she'd been caught in a time warp with in Redcliffe Castle, had inquired, out of the blue. For some reason she felt a kinship with Dorian, even though his background was much different than hers.
"Confused," she managed to blurt out, shrugging her shoulders.
"Good," she heard Varric Tethras, the group's resident bard who was recording their adventures for posterity, yell from another part of the room. "Confusion is a part of life."
Come to think of it, every single one of her misfit companions came from different places, and different perspectives, from where she did - that was what she liked about this ragtag bunch. Elisheva may not have agreed with their perspectives most of the time, but she respected them. Balancing everyone's points of view and keeping them happy was a difficult job, but she had grown to relish it.
Now that they were in Skyhold, they were officially an organization. Their work of fixing Thedas had really, truly begun.