Prologue: Andraste's Grace
"How do you feel?" Leliana asked, as she placed the last bough of Andraste's Grace into the mass of brown curls piled atop Elissa's head.
"Ridiculous," was the honest reply.
"Nonsense!" the bard cried, moving to adjust the exquisite necklace around the bride's neck. "You've been at war for so long, you've just forgotten how to be a lady. Which is what you are, a lady!"
Elissa smiled at her friend, but it wasn't true. She remembered full well how to be a lady. She remembered full well that she was a lady, born, bred, and raised. How could she forget, especially looking at herself in the mirror now?
Everything else felt like the dream; the Blight, the Civil War, the Archdemon, it all flitted in and out of her consciousness like a particularly bad smell. The thought that she had spent two years sleeping out of doors, eating whatever they managed to kill or scrape together with what little gold they had, and alternately begging for aid against the Blight and running for their lives, seemed ridiculous to her as she woke every morning in a castle much like the one she'd grown up in, and went about the exact kind of life her parents had imagined for her.
After all that, she thought, I'm basically back where I started.
Small things reminded her of the truth. Her mother was not dressing her for her wedding. Her father would not give her away. The haunted look in her brother's once perenielly jovial eyes. The scar that ran diagonally across her right collarbone from shoulder to sternum, a gift from that crazy cult leader Kolgrim.
And, of course, the dreams.
It occurred to her, not without irony, that if Loghain hadn't had a daughter, she would have been the logical match for Cailan. Instead she had traipsed across Ferelden with a sheepish templar who turned out to be a royal bastard, and fell in love. And the Maker had seen fit to dump her right back into a castle anyway. Onto a throne, no less.
Not that she had any idea what she would do when she got there.
Maker help us all….